In reply to no_more_scotch_eggs:
> 'Clouds made from droplets of molten iron'- may give it a miss...
Interestingly the actual paper makes no mention of "molten iron", and I've no idea how such a thing would be detected anyhow. So, whoever wrote this press release seems to have embellished that bit.
> But how can the cloud temperature be 800c, if its the size of Jupiter- what could be its heat source?
The heat source would be contraction under gravity.
> And- the 'telescope in chile' shows multiple layers of thick and thin clouds- how can they tell- at 75 light years they can't resolve surface detail on a Jupiter sized object, surely..?
You're right, they can't. What they did is observe the object to vary in intensity over time. They hypothesize that the object has patchy clouds, and that, as it rotates the patchy clouds cause the change in observed light.
They also model the spectrum, finding that a combination of two temperatures, 100 K different, ``marginally fit the spectrum better than a single component fit''. Hence different cloud layers at different temperatures.
Overall, the press release seems rather ``inventive''.