For the first time, astronomers have observed what they think is a rainbow-like event happening on a planet outside of our solar system.
This finding may provide fresh information on extraterrestrial life.
A "glory effect" has been seen on WASP-76b, a very hot exoplanet located 637 light-years away from Earth, according to observations made with the European Space Agency's
Characterising ExOplanet Satellite, or Cheops space telescope.
The phenomenon, which is frequently observed on Earth, is caused when light bounces off homogeneous clouds and appears as colorful, concentric rings of light.
Before Cheops and other missions detected an extraordinarily weak signal that suggested the glory effect occurs in the atmosphere of the hellishly hot WASP-76b, it had only been observed on Venus.
According to the signal that Cheops picked up, astronomers think that the atmospheric phenomena is facing Earth directly.
The exoplanet closely orbits its host star, and the intense heat and radiation received from that sun-like star — more than 4,000 times the amount of radiation that Earth gets from our sun —