Exometeorologists have managed to create a map of the clouds on a planet outside our solar system for the first time.
Kepler-7b is a massive, gaseous giant of a planet – like a scaled-up version of Jupiter. It has a surface temperature of around 1400C, but that’s relatively cool considering it sits far closer to its star than Earth does - just 0.06 astronomical units away.
As such, it’s easy to spot when it’s passing that star, and by training the Spitzer and Kepler space telescopes on it for three years, a team at MIT have been able to map its cloud structures. It has high clouds in its western hemisphere, and clearer skies in the east.