Astronomers observe the 'layer cake' levels of a prospective star to understand the super Jupiters.

Our cosmic block is full of neighbors that we know very little about, but scientists have come up with a creative new way to get a peek at the layers of one particular type of planet.

Super Jupiters are exactly what they look like: massive gas exoplanets that may be up to 13 times larger than our Jupiter neighbourhood. To better understand these worlds, the scientists behind new research have used "stranded stars" called dark dwarfs as proxies.

Brown dwarves are gas balls up to 80 times the mass of Jupiter which have almost become stars without ever crossing the finish line. Though too large and isolated to be considered as planets, brown dwarfs lack the mass to experiment with nuclear fusion and become true stars.

Elena Manjavacas, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, led a group of astronomers to study the "layer-cake" structure of the clouds belonging to a brown dwarf with the lengthy moniker 2MASS J22081363+2921215.

Although astronomers have successfully analyzed the composition of some super Jupiters, Manjavacas and the team substituted brown dwarfs because the details of these smaller planets' clouds can get lost in the glare of their parent stars. The study of solitary bodies like the brown midget in their new article, which will be published in The Astronomical Journal, helps them avoid this problem.

Substitution also works because super Jupiters and brown dwarfs have a lot in common: they are massive, reach similar temperatures and exhibit various atmospheres.

The brown midget of the new study is young and very bright, so that it radiates strongly in the near-infrared part of the electromagnetic spectrum. The team hoped that getting a detailed look at 2MASS J22081363+2921215 would help them learn about the atmosphere of a super Jupiter called Beta Pictoris b, which was discovered in 2008 and has roughly the same mass as the brown dwarf. The two worlds share the same origin and are part of the group of objects known as the moving group Beta Pictoris, which is located 115 light-years from Earth.

To see the turbulent atmosphere of the brown dwarf, which turns every 3.5 hours, the researchers used the Multi-bject Spectrograph for Infrared Exploration (MOSFIRE) instrument on the W. M. Keck Observatory on Maunakea in Hawaiʻi.

MOSFIRE was able to analyze the signatures of the different chemical elements in the clouds, and the team then used computer models to anchor the observations to their respective altitudes. The rapid pace at which the brown dwarf rotated meant that some cloud tops separated by whipping, creating pauses where deeper layers could be seen.

Manjavacas' team found traces of potassium iodide in the brown dwarf's atmosphere (which also includes magnesium silicate), then underneath that, a layer of sodium iodide and magnesium silicate, followed by aluminum oxide clouds at the bottom.