Salt clouds in a planetary-mass companion
AstronomyComments
It is the same as when people thought they found phosphine on Venus. We love finding evidence that fits a neat narrative, even if it is just a glitch in the matrix.
The processing techniques here actually provide a blueprint for characterizing other low-temperature objects. By isolating the salt features, we can better constrain the C/O ratio, which is a critical proxy for formation history.
Does the specific salt composition suggest where the object formed in the disk... maybe further out than we thought? I wonder if this changes the timeline for how these companions migrate...
We spent a decade relying on ground-based data for this object and got nothing but noise. It shows how much of our established planetary models are just guesses until we get the hardware actually out of the atmosphere.
If the ground-based data was that poor, how do we know the JWST processing didn't over-fit the noise to match the expected salt signature?
I disagree that the previous models were just guesses. The theoretical frameworks for cold atmospheres predicted these condensates long before the JWST data confirmed them.
the signal-to-noise ratio on these low-mass companions usually requires extreme contrast imaging to isolate the companion from the primary star.
This could mean other cold brown dwarfs or rogue planets have similar chemistry that we just haven't had the resolution to see yet. It opens up a whole new category of atmospheric modeling.