Image: Gran Telescopio Canarias in Spain's Canary Islands. Miguel Briganti/SMM/IAC

Hubble Fellow Mercedes López-Morales is part of a research group led by astronomers at the University of Exeter, UK, that has recently discovered potassium in the atmosphere of giant planet XO-2B using the Gran Telescopio Canarias in Spain’s Canary Islands. Coincidently, another team from the University of Florida made the same discovery with the same technique while observing HD 80606b from the Gran Telescopio. Both groups utilized the new observational technique known as narrow-band transit spectrophotometry that can measure the light absorbed by the atoms and molecules in a planet’s atmosphere. These findings support previous computer models that predicted the structure of the atmospheres of such planets.

López-Morales’ team and the University of Florida group have submitted their findings to Astronomy and Astrophysics and Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, respectively. Preprints of the articles are available here and here. More information can also be found on Science Daily.