14 DAY TRIAL // Astronomers claim to have discovered the first water ice clouds to have ever been documented on a celestial body orbiting a star other than our Sun.
In a paper in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, the scientists detail that such clouds comprise teeny tiny crystals of water ice, and have until now only been found to hover over Jupiter, Neptune, Uranus, and Saturn.
“Ice clouds are predicted to be very important in the atmospheres of planets beyond our Solar System, but they've never been observed outside of it before now,” explains Jacqueline Faherty with the Carnegie Institution for Science.
The water ice clouds that the researchers claim to have identified outside our Solar System are hovering over a celestial body known as a brown dwarf. The body's not-so-appealing moniker is WISE J085510.83-071442.5, or W0855.
As detailed in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, brown dwarfs are basically substellar objects that simply do not pack enough mass to be able to sustain the hydrogen fusion process that births actual stars. However, they are not planets either.
Scientists like to probe the anatomy of such celestial bodies hoping to obtain data that would help shed new light on star-formation processes. Due to the fact that they seldom have companions, brown dwarfs are more easily studied.