Post by Eugene 2.0 on Sept 14, 2022 9:59:37 GMT
An international team led by Université de Montréal researchers has discovered an exoplanet they believe may be up to 30% water — meaning it could be the first known ocean planet.
Why it matters: Liquid water is necessary for life as we know it, so if we want to find evidence of extraterrestrial life, an exoplanet covered in large bodies of water would be a good place to start.
Decades of searching space have yet to reveal an ocean planet — Earth is still the only place we know of with bodies of liquid water on its surface — but we are also very limited in what we can observe about distant planets.
Up to 30% of TOI-1452 b’s mass could be from water, according to the team’s modeling.
What’s new: The UdeM team has now discovered a promising ocean planet candidate in the “Goldilocks zone” of a star 100 light-years from Earth.
They first noticed signs of the exoplanet, TOI-1452 b, in data collected by NASA’s TESS space telescope. They then conducted follow-up observations of it using UdeM’s Mont Mégantic Observatory and Hawaii’s Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope.
Based on those observations, the exoplanet appears to be about 70% larger than Earth with just five times its mass. That means it’s less dense than Earth, where metal and rock account for 99% of the planet’s mass and water accounts for just 1%.
www.freethink.com/space/ocean-planet
www.freethink.com/space/ocean-planet
