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What’s The Forecast On Kepler-7B? Hot And Cloudy (NPR)

An artist’s rendition of Kepler-7b (left) with Jupiter for comparison. (Photo: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MIT)

What’s The Forecast On Kepler-7B? Hot And Cloudy

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October 01, 201311:02 AM

Scientists are reasonably sure that it’s a cloudy day on , a planet that orbits its star about 1,000 light-years away from us.

Using NASA’s orbiting space telescopes, researchers publishing in say that for the first time they’ve been able to make a rudimentary map of the atmosphere of an extrasolar planet.

The team used faint visible light and infrared reflections from Kepler-7b to make their cloud map.

“By observing this planet with Spitzer and Kepler [telescopes] for more than three years, we were able to produce a very low-resolution ‘map’ of this giant, gaseous planet,” study co-author Brice-Olivier Demory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge said in a statement.