Astronomers find 'first signs' of water ice clouds beyond solar system

Astronomers have recently discovered the first evidence of water ice clouds beyond the solar system.

Water ice clouds exist on our own gas giant planets; Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune but have not been seen outside of the planets orbiting our Sun until now.

At the Las Campanas Observatory in Chile, Faherty, along with a team including Carnegie's Andrew Monson, used the FourStar near infrared camera to detect the coldest brown dwarf ever characterized. Their findings are the result of 151 images taken over three nights and combined.

The object, named WISE J085510.83-071442.5, or W0855, was first seen by NASA's Wide-Field Infrared Explorer mission and published earlier in 2014. But it was not known if it could be detected by Earth-based facilities.

W0855 was the fourth-closest system to our own Sun, practically a next-door neighbor in astronomical distances. A comparison of the team's near-infrared images of W0855 with models for predicting the atmospheric content of brown dwarfs showed evidence of frozen clouds of sulfide and water.

Jacqueline Faherty said that 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.

The study is published by The Astrophysical Journal Letters.