Water is a hot topic in the study of exoplanets, including "hot Jupiters," whose masses are similar to that of Jupiter, but lie much closer to their parent star than Jupiter is to the sun. They are estimated to be a scorching 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit, meaning any water they host would take the form of water vapor.
Astronomers have found many hot Jupiters with water in their atmospheres, but other hot Jupiters appear to have none. In a new study, scientists used exoplanet data from a single instrument on NASA's Hubble Space Telescope to uniformly characterize a group of 19 hot Jupiters previously... Read more