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Artist’s Concept of the Hot Planet Osiris
This is an artistic illustration of the gas giant planet HD 209458b (unofficially named Osiris) located 150 light-years away in the constellation Pegasus. This is a "hot Jupiter" class planet. Estimated to be 220 times the mass of Earth. The planet's atmosphere is a seething 2,150 degrees Fahrenheit. It orbits very closely to its bright sunlike star, and the orbit is tilted edge-on to Earth. This makes the planet an ideal candidate for the Hubble Space Telescope to be used to make precise measurements of the chemical composition of the giant's atmosphere as starlight filters though it. To the surprise of astronomers, they have found much less water vapor in the atmosphere than standard planet-formation models predict.
- Release DateJuly 24, 2014
- Science ReleaseHubble Finds Three Surprisingly Dry Exoplanets
- CreditNASA, ESA, Gregory Bacon
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Atmospheric Spectra of Three Hot Jupiters Showing Water Absorption
This graph compares observations with modeled infrared spectra of three hot-Jupiter-class exoplanets that were spectroscopically observed with the Hubble Space Telescope. The red curve in each case is the best-fit model spectrum for the detection of water vapor absorption in the...
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Last Updated
Mar 28, 2025
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Claire Andreoli
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
Greenbelt, Maryland
claire.andreoli@nasa.gov