Scientists find new ‘waterworlds’ unlike any planet in our solar system
The planets are almost entirely made up of water. This is the first time that scientists are sure they have found planets like this.
Scientists say that the researchers are much more innovative than we thought. Before, they were thought to be much more ordinary planets.
“We used to think that planets that were a little bit bigger than Earth were big balls of metal and rock, like bigger versions of Earth, so we called them super-Earths,” said Bjorn Benneke, an astrophysics professor at the University of Montreal who worked on the new research.
“However, we have now shown that these two planets, Kepler-138c and d, are very different: a big part of their total volume is likely made of water. It’s the first time we’ve seen planets that we can be sure are water worlds, a type of planet that astronomers have thought existed for a long time but had never seen.
Scientists haven’t seen the water with their own eyes, which is hard to do from so far away. But research showed that up to half of the planet should be made of something lighter than rocks and heavier than hydrogen. The most likely candidate for this material is water.
The two planets go around the star Kepler-138, which is 218 light years away in the constellation Lyra. They have three times the volume and twice the mass of Earth, but they are much less dense than Earth.
The Kepler Space Telescope was used to find the planets around Kepler-138 for the first time in 2014. Scientists used the transit method to find them. With this method, they watch for a small dip in the light from a star when a planet moves in front of it.
The new research was based on more observations made with NASA’s Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes, which let scientists figure out what the planets are made of. Scientists thought that the planets were in fact water worlds because of the extra information they had.
Scientists warn that the water worlds don’t look like the typical planet we might think of, with a surface mostly made up of water like Earth’s oceans. Instead, the planets are likely to be so hot that water will turn into steam as soon as it touches the surface. This will make a thick, dense atmosphere that may hide liquid water.
The planets are also outside of the habitable zone. They are too hot for water to stay liquid, so they are probably not good places for life to live. But new research has found that the system has an extra planet called Kepler-138e, which is in the zone where life can exist.
The planet is smaller and farther away from its star than Earth. One year on the planet is equal to 38 days on Earth. Scientists still don’t know everything about it, though, because it doesn’t seem to pass in front of its host star.
In a new paper called “Evidence for the volatile-rich composition of a 1.5-Earth-radius planet,” published in Nature Astronomy, the researchers explain what they found.
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