Jakarta -The hunters exoplanet find out where the two are planet which has a water content like Earth. Is it habitable?
Using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and the retired Spitzer Space Telescope, scientists have identified two apparently submerged exoplanets that are one of the pillars of life.
Located in a star system about 218 light-years away, the blue planets, named Kepler-138c and Kepler-138d, orbit a faint red dwarf star.
Quoted from detikINET CNETKepler-138c and Kepler-138d are about one and a half times the size of Earth and have a mass about twice that of planet we.
“We previously thought that planets slightly larger than Earth were planets filled with metal or giant chunks of rock, like enlarged versions of Earth, which is why we called them super Earths,” said Björn Benneke, a professor at the University of Montreal. the authors of this paper.
In fact, NASA’s online catalog of exoplanets still refers to Kepler d, for example, as a “potentially rocky” world. However, Benneke said, their research had shown that the two planets had very different properties.
“A large part of its entire volume is likely made up of water,” Benneke said.
Overall, it marks the first time scientists have confidently identified an exoplanet found as a watery world, which Benneke says is the kind of planet astronomers have long theorized exist but have yet to prove with great certainty.
Before we go any further, the main thing to keep in mind is that these so-called aquatic planets didn’t always have oceans as one might think.
“Temperatures in the atmospheres of Kepler-138c and Kepler-138d are likely to be above the boiling point of water, and we expect there to be thick, dense atmospheres made of vapor on these planets,” said Caroline Piaulet, team leader and Ph. .D. student at the University of Montreal.
“Just below the atmosphere, that vapor has the potential to become liquid water under high pressure, or even water in another phase that occurs under high pressure, which is called supercritical fluid,” he continued.
Researchers think the Kepler twins are more like a larger version of Europa or Enceladus. Note that Europa and Enceladus are water-rich moons currently orbiting Jupiter and Saturn.
“Instead of an ice surface, Kepler-138 c and d will host a large veil of water vapor,” Piaulet said.
Technically, both exoplanets studied were discovered in the past by NASA’s Kepler space telescope (hence their name), but only now do scientists feel they have confirmation of the planet’s composition.
Although they confirmed that Kepler-138 b, also in the red dwarf system Kepler 138, is a terrestrial planet with a mass of about 0.0066 Earth masses, they need more observations for c and d.
“As our instruments and techniques become sensitive enough to find and study planets far from their stars, we may start to find more aquatic worlds like Kepler-138 and ced,” Benneke said.
In addition, an additional benefit of this observation is the discovery of children planet New Kepler 138 which will probably be called Kepler-138 e.
Piaulet and his team were surprised to see a fourth planet in the system, smaller and farther from its star than the other three. But perhaps most interesting is that Kepler-138 and appears to be in the habitable zone.
Source : https://inet.detik.com/science/d-6466169/2-planet-berair-mirip-bumi-ditemukan-nasa?single=1
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