Exoplanet hunters published a paper on Thursday in the journal Nature Astronomy announcing that we have now added another extraterrestrial globe to our reserve.
Scientists have identified two exoplanets that appear to be wrapped in sheets of none other than water, the elixir of life, using NASA’s orbiting Hubble and retired Spitzer Space Telescopes.
These blue objects, known as Kepler-138 c and Kepler-138 d, circle a faint red dwarf star 218 light-years distant in a solar system. They are about 1.5 times as huge and have masses that are nearly twice as hefty as those of Earth. The narrative of the Kepler pair is strangely contradictory since these measurements give the impression that they are distantly related to one another on Earth.
In a statement, co-author of the work and University of Montreal professor Björn Benneke stated, “We previously imagined that planets that were a little larger than Earth were enormous balls of metal and rock, like scaled-up replicas of Earth.
In reality, the NASA online Exoplanet Catalog still describes Kepler d as a “potentially rocky” world.
“But we have now shown that these two planets, Kepler-138c and d, are substantially different in nature: a sizeable fraction of their entire volume is probably formed of water,” Benneke stated.
To read our blog on “How To communicate with extraterrestrials: new research,” click here.
