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Water Discovered In Exoplanet Atmosphere
PattonPending sends news of the discovery of the smallest exoplanet yet to have water vapor in its atmosphere. Astronomers have detected water vapor in the atmosphere of a planet that orbits a star far beyond our solar system. Observations of the Neptune-sized planet, which lies 120 light years from Earth in the constellation of Cygnus, revealed that its atmosphere was mostly hydrogen with around 25% made up from water va-pour. Until now, researchers have been frustrated in their efforts to study the atmospheres of planets much smaller than Jupiter because their skies were thick with clouds. The problem was so persistent that astronomers had begun to think that all warm, small planets formed with substantial cloud cover. But writing in the journal Nature, scientists in the U.S. describe how they found a Neptune-sized planet with cloud-free skies, enabling them to make detailed measurements of a small planet's atmosphere for the first time.
Assuming the cloud is water droplets and not methane or whatever.)
Clouds or other forms of haze can be made of all kinds of things, and we observe this in our solar system, so there is no reason to assume clouds or haze in exoplanet atmospheres are water vapour.
Remember, all we know is we can't get decent absorption spectra from them, so assuming anything about them would be saying, "We can't see anything, so we know it's water."
That's like saying, "I know that's a Muslim woman because they are completely covered and I can't see their face" (there have been many cases of men, mostly criminals and not always Muslim, wearing similar clothing because people seemed tuned up to make precisely this error of "I can't see it, so what I can't see must be X".)
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
says Wiki:
However, the orbit of this planet is eccentric, at around 0.198, unusually high for hot Neptunes. HAT-P-11b's orbit is also highly inclined, with a tilt of approximately 103 degrees relative to its star's rotation.
The planet is a hot neptune, meaning it is almost in size equal to neptune, and the eccentric orbit is the eccentricity of the elliptical orbit. for a exact circle, it's eccentricity is 1. for a hyperbola, it's > 1, and for ellipse, it's Also, "the HAT acronym stands for Hungarian-made Automated Telescope, because it was developed by a small group of Hungarians who met through the Hungarian Astronomical Association", is what wiki says on the nomenclature HAT.