While long-fabled technologies like Smell-O-Vision are still a long way off from ever being a reality, astronomers can still technically smell stuff deep in space without actually having to get a whiff of anything with their noses.
Using the James Webb Space Telescope, a team led by astronomers from the University of Oxford has identified a planet that, in theory, smells entirely of rotten eggs. This perpetually stinky state it exists in isn’t the only interesting thing about it. It also breaks some of our preconceptions of what a planet can even be.
The exoplanet L 98-59 d, located about 35 light-years from Earth, appears to belong to an entirely new class of worlds defined by extreme chemistry and a permanently molten interior.
This Newly Discovered Planet Smells Like Farts and Looks Like Absolute Hell
Roughly 1.6 times the size of Earth, L 98-59 d was previously thought to be either a rocky “super-Earth” or a gas-rich sub-Neptune. But new observations indicate that it is an atmosphere loaded with sulfur-based gases like hydrogen sulfide and sulfur dioxide, compounds known here on Earth for their brutal, unmistakable stink. That stink alone makes it noteworthy, but it’s what’s happening beneath its surface that truly makes it unique.
Using telescope data combined with computer simulations, researchers reconstructed the planet’s history and internal structure. It turns out, deep beneath that foul stench, lies a world covered by a planet-wide ocean of magma, where molten rock stretches deep into the mantle. It’s a vast churning reservoir that acts like a planetary storage tank, trapping sulfur over billions of years and slowly releasing it into the atmosphere.
This process helps explain how the planet has held onto its thick, volatile atmosphere despite getting blasted by constant radiation from its nearby star. All that ultraviolet radiation fuels reactions that cycle materials between the sky and the molten core, ultimately creating planetary conditions unlike anything we’ve seen in our solar system.
Researchers who published their findings in Nature Astronomy believe the planet might have started out larger than it is, but gradually shrank as it lost its atmosphere over time. What’s left is a planet that we can’t exactly call rocky, but we can exactly call gaseous either.
All we know is that it stinks and it’s not even a little bit habitable, and that if this weird thing exists and a relatively nearby star system, how many other planets are there out there that don’t fit neatly within the rules we’ve been using?
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