大象传媒

Smelly planet stinks of 'rotten eggs'

An illustration of a blue exoplanet with the sun close by.Image source, ROBERTO MOLAR CANDANOSA/JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY

Is this one of the least inviting planets in space?

As well as weather much worse than anything on Earth, scientists have found that a distant exoplanet also stinks of rotten eggs.

Known as HD 189733, the striking blue planet may look friendly but the colour actually comes from clouds laced with glass. It's believed to actually rain molten glass!

It also has extremely hot temperatures of over 900C.

Using data from the James Webb Space Telescope, scientists have been studying the atmosphere of HD 189733 and have found it is mainly made up of hydrogen sulphide.

Hydrogen sulphide has a smell like rotten eggs, it's also the gas which makes farts smell!

"So, if your nose could work at 1000C ... the atmosphere would smell like rotten eggs," said Dr Guangwei Fu, from Johns Hopkins University.

The astrophysicist led the research which was published in the journal Nature.

Although hydrogen sulphide is one of the gasses that can show that distant planets might be home to alien organisms, researchers aren't searching for life on this planet because it's a gas giant, like Jupiter, and too hot.

This is the first detection on an exoplanet, or a planet outside our solar system.

While there are no plans to search for life or visit this uninviting planet, scientists say finding hydrogen sulphide here is a step toward understanding how planets form.