Scientists from Trinity College Dublin (TCD) say they have discovered how to decode weather in faraway deep space worlds.
The researchers have identified that the weather on a well-studied brown dwarf, “SIMP 0136”, previously linked with Northern Lights-like phenomena, is largely shaped by just two dominant processes: changes in temperature and the vertical structure of its clouds.
Using observations from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), the team applied a statistical technique called Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to track how the object's light changes as it rotates.
PCA simplifies complex data by identifying the main patterns that change together across the observations. In this study, those dominant patterns are linked to weather-related changes in the brown dwarf’s atmosphere, which allowed their distinction from smaller fluctuations and random “noise” in the data.
Rather than relying on complex assumptions about its atmosphere, the method allowed the researchers to identify the key physical processes directly from the data.
These data showed minute changes in brightness of the planetary mass object as it rotated thanks to the exceptional sensitivity of JWST’s instruments.
The TCD team says the insight reveals an atmosphere whose observed changes can be explained by “three recurring weather states that rotate in and out of view, producing a patchwork of hotter, thinner-cloud regions, alongside cooler areas with thicker, vertically extended clouds”.
The new research has been published in the leading journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.
