Planetary Science & Exploration Seminar

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Lunch @ Mitchell Patio, 12:00pm (or at the Mitchell 3rd floor lobby depending on weather)

Abstract: Minerals are familiar as the rocks that compose terrestrial planets. Yet recent observations show that these same materials can condense into clouds suspended in hot planetary atmospheres above 1000 K. I will present possible evidence from NASA’s Juno mission for mineral clouds hidden thousands of kilometers below Jupiter’s visible atmosphere, potentially explaining the mystery of its missing alkali metals. I will then discuss silicate clouds observed by JWST in hot exoplanets, such as the super-Jupiter VHS 1256 b, where our dynamical simulations demonstrate that the observed large variability is driven by global, inhomogeneous silicate dust storms rather than the stable banded structures previously assumed for such bodies. Together, these discoveries reveal how mineral clouds shape the chemistry, weather, and appearance of hot worlds, pointing to a newly recognized regime of planetary atmospheric physics.

Xi Zhang is a professor in the Earth and Planetary Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He earned his bachelor’s degree from Peking University in China in 2007 and his PhD from Caltech in 2013. He has been a faculty member at UCSC since 2015. Xi’s group works on a variety of topics in planetary atmospheres. He won the Greeley Early Career Award in AGU in 2019