Reshared post from Dustin Wyatt
But now a team of astronomers led by UChicago's Laura Kreidberg and Jacob Bean have detected clear evidence of clouds in the atmosphere of GJ 1214b from data collected with the Hubble Space Telescope. The Hubble observations used 96 hours of telescope time spread over 11 months. This was the largest Hubble program ever devoted to studying a single exoplanet.
The actual paper from Nature can be found here: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v505/n7481/full/nature12888.html
Of course, in the grand scientific tradition, the paper is gated and thus costs money to read.
Researchers use Hubble Telescope to reveal cloudy weather on alien world
A team of scientists led by researchers in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Chicago report they have definitively characterized the atmosphere of a super-Earth class planet orbiting another star for the first time.
Originally posted on Google+ · January 1, 2014
Hi Dustin – just wanted to let you know, the paper is available for free download at http://arxiv.org/abs/1401.0022. Making papers available on arXiv is another part of the grand scientific tradition 🙂