LIFTING THE VEIL

Alien planets are shrouded in hazes that hide clues to their makeup. Lab experiments could help clear the view

“Most of the time, people treat these particles as nuisances,” says Lia Corrales, an astronomer at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. In a paper posted this month to the preprint server arXiv, Corrales and colleagues show how even slight changes to experimental conditions can produce tholins with distinct optical properties. “Aerosols themselves have some of that [compositional] information because they have spectral shapes,” she says.

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