For the first time ever the colour of the atmosphere of an exoplanet has been detected.  The discovery was made recently by a team led by astrophysicist Tom Evans at the University of Oxford using the  Hubble Space Telescope. The planet imaginatively designated HD 189733b.  HD189733  being the star 63 light-years away that has this giant gas planet in its close embrace. The planet orbits the star at around 400000kms per hour and takes just 2-2 days to completes its year, unlike our slower 365 days.

Seared by solar winds, its atmosphere is stripped away and blasted into space by extreme ultraviolet and X-ray radiation at the rate of 1,000 tonnes every second.

The scorched atmosphere that survives the onslaught is rent by 1,000-degree winds laden with silicate particles, which, propelled by 7,000kph winds, become raindrops from hell propelled sideways as supersonic shards of molten glass.

Indeed, if there is one exoplanet that deserves to have the blues, HD 1897733b has become the first exoplanet to have its true colour determined… and (in line with that rather laboured set-up) that colour is blue. Not the life-giving oxygen blue of the earth but a hell of hurling hot winds with silicate particles in suspension

It is a near neighbour and one of the closest extrasolar planets, or exoplanets, that can be seen crossing the face of its star-making it the most studied of all the alien planets.

After doubting the very existence of planets beyond our solar system, scientists discovered the first exoplanets in the early 1990s. Today, with the help of planet-hunting colossi like Nasa’s Kepler and ESA’sCOROT space telescopes, the exoplanet count stands in the thousands. As a gas giant called a ‘hot Jupiter’, Howlin’ Dave is typical of most of those finds – being big and hot (close to their stars) makes them relatively easy to spot.

But this is the first time astronomers have been able to measure an exoplanet’s colour and imagine how it would actually look through the window of your interstellar camper van if you were able to fly past.

The planet’s blue colour, which has been described as a ‘deep cobalt blue’, is thought to come from clouds laden with reflective particles that contain silicon – raindrops of molten glass that scatter blue wavelengths of light.

In 2007, scientists using Nasa’s Spitzer Space Telescope produced one of the first temperature maps of an exoplanet. It revealed a Janus-like world with one face tidally locked in a permanent furnace-facing gaze and the other hidden in eternal darkness.

The two sides differ in temperature by hundreds of degrees, driving the atmospheric turbulence that results in the planet’s extreme winds.

Last year, Nasa’s Swift satellite saw hydrogen atoms being torn from the planet’s atmosphere at 500,000kph by powerful solar winds – that’s what happens when you orbit just 4million km from your star Dave (we orbit our star at a far more sensible 150million km).

Then, just two weeks ago, astronomers turned the European Southern Observatory’s pragmatically named Very Large Telescope on the planet and detected water molecules in its atmosphere – the first time good old H2O had been found on an exoplanet.

Fascinating weird weather-driven planet to be sure!