Rain on Earth is something we got to know well. It’s relatively predictable in size and shape, and while we notice more extreme weather and lack of rain in some parts of the world (thanks to climate change, which is our fault, by the way), rain itself doesn’t change much. It turns out that the same is true for other planets, and a new study suggests that while the composition of precipitation can vary dramatically on alien worlds, the raindrops would look very familiar to human travelers.
The research, which was published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets, suggests that the physics that determines how water droplets form and fall to Earth will likely result in similar precipitation on other planets, even if the composition of the “rain” is very different. When modeling raindrops falling through the atmospheres of planets like Jupiter and Saturn, which are vastly different from rocky planets like Earth, they found that the type of planet doesn’t matter all that much when it comes to rain.
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The researchers simulated precipitation through different types of atmospheres and found that what determines the size of raindrops on Earth appears to be universally true across the board. If droplets are too small, they evaporate before they reach the surface, but if they are too large, they disintegrate into smaller droplets before being hit. The middle ground is where the vast majority of the droplets end up after falling from a significant distance, regardless of the type of atmosphere present or the composition of the rain itself.
Some worlds have slightly larger rain than Earth, such as Saturn’s moon Titan. Raindrops on Titan, which are made of methane instead of liquid water, are believed to be about twice the size of raindrops on Earth, but that’s still a very small change for such a completely different planet. It sounds wild, but it makes sense. Physics doesn’t care what planet you are on and will control everything the same way.
What’s more exciting is that soon we may have the telescope technology to make even more accurate estimates of rainfall on other worlds, at least if the James Webb Space Telescope ever launches.
‘Now with instruments such as [the James Webb Space Telescope], which will hopefully be launched soon, we will be able to detect very fine spectra of exoplanetary atmospheres, including those quite cooler than the ones we can usually characterize, in which clouds and rain will occur, “planetary scientist Tristan Guillot, who was not part of the research team, said of the work. “So these kinds of tools as they are being developed will be very useful and important for interpreting those spectra.”
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See the original version of this article at BGR.com