Nasa Telescopes Find 2 Alien Planets Made Mostly Of Water: Exoplanet explorers have rediscovered distant worlds, and this time they have found ones with water.
A new study revealed on Thursday in the journal Nature Astronomy indicates that two planets 218 light years from Earth are water worlds.
The University of Montreal-led team discovered evidence that two exoplanets circling red dwarf stars are “water worlds,” where water makes up a significant portion of the planet’s mass.
These planets, which are found in a planetary system 218 light-years from Earth in the constellation Lyra, are distinct from all the planets in our solar system.
The group, led by Caroline Piaulet of the Institute for Research on Exoplanets (iREx) at the University of Montreal, has just released a thorough analysis of this planetary system, also known as Kepler-138, in the journal Nature Astronomy.
With the help of NASA’s Hubble and the decommissioned Spitzer satellite observatories, Piaulet and colleagues analyzed the exoplanets Kepler-138c and Kepler-138d and determined that they might be mostly made of water.
Source: NASA
Exoplanet searchers have rediscovered alien worlds, and this time they’ve found ones with water on them (Image: Université of Montréal / SWNS).
These two planets, along with Kepler-138b, a smaller planet partner located nearer to the star, had already been found by NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope. Additionally, the latest investigation discovered proof of a fourth planet.
Kepler-138c and d did not directly identify water, but by comparing the sizes and masses of the planets to models, astronomers come to the conclusion that a sizeable portion of their volume – up to half of it – should be formed of materials that are lighter than rock but heavier than hydrogen or helium (which constitute the bulk of gas giant planets like Jupiter). Of these potential resources, water is the most prevalent.
According to Björn Benneke, a co-author of the paper and professor of astrophysics at the University of Montreal, “we previously thought that planets that were a little larger than Earth were enormous balls of metal and rock, like scaled-up versions of Earth.”
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However, we have now demonstrated that these two planets, Kepler-138c, and d, are very distinct in nature and that a significant portion of their total volume is probably constituted of water.
The two potential water worlds Kepler-138c and d are not in the habitable zone, which is the region surrounding a star where temperatures would let liquid water exist on the surface of a rocky planet.
Researchers discovered fresh proof of a new planet in the system, Kepler-138e, in the habitable zone in the Hubble and Spitzer data.
The orbit of this newly discovered planet, which takes 38 days to complete, is smaller and farther away from its star than the previous three. But since it doesn’t appear to transit its host star, it’s still unclear what kind of planet this other one is.
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