KABARLAH.COM, Jakarta – Exoplanet hunters have discovered the existence of two planets that have 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 water-filled 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 by detikINET from CNET, Kepler-138c and Kepler-138d are about one-and-a-half times the size of Earth and have a mass about twice that of our planet.
“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 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 icy surface, Kepler-138 c and d will host large layers 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 have 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 further observations of c and d.
“As our instruments and techniques become sensitive enough to find and study planets far from their stars, we may start discovering more aquatic worlds like Kepler-138 and ced,” Benneke said.
Also, an added benefit of these observations is the discovery of a new child planet Kepler 138 which will likely be named 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.
This isn’t the first time scientists have discovered aquatic planets. In recent years, technological advances in astronomy have helped scientists discover more watery planets. Last year, researchers from the European Space Observatory (ESO) discovered a planet that has water and is rocky.
The distance is quite close to Earth, “only” 35 light years from here. Scientists say that perhaps this planet has all the components that make life there possible.
Astronomers see this planet in the southern constellation Volans, located in the “Goldilocks” or habitable zone of the solar system. Scientists believe that this zone allows life to survive.
Most important of all, discoveries of this kind are an important step in the quest to find extraterrestrial life in the cosmos.
