NASA Researchers Use Hubble Telescope to Discover Water World

Long, long ago, and far far away…

Okay, really it wasn’t that long ago, but it is very far away.

What is it? It’s a world outside our solar system that has liquid water covering it’s entire surface.

The planet, which has the very dull name of GJ 1214b, orbits a red dwarf star about forty light years distant from the Earth. It was discovered in 2009 by a Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics research team. Another group of CfA scientists led by Jacob Bean made the first observations of the planet, and concluded it was most likely made mostly of water.

Zachery Berta and his co-authors, also of the CfA, have used the Hubble space telescope to confirm these findings, according to a press release by NASA on Feb. 21. Berta and his team used Hubble’s high-tech cameras to record the newly discovered planet’s progress across the face of its host star. They studied how light changed as it came through the atmosphere, which can help determine what gases are present.

“We’re using Hubble to measure the infrared color of sunset on this world.” Breta explained in the press release.

Breta and his co-authors have submitted a research paper for publication in Astrophysical Journal. This paper explained that the infrared frequency of the star that the planet orbits is especially favorable for making these sort of observations. The paper went on to conclude that “Based on our observations, this atmosphere would likely consist of more than 50 percent water by mass …”

The scientists believe that the planet likely formed farther out in the system as an ice planet, and slowly drifted closer to its red dwarf host, thawing the ice.

Just because there is liquid water there, don’t expect there to be life. The water planet is much larger than the earth, and much hotter. Water would act much differently there, because of the temperature and pressure. These factors cause strange phenomena like “hot ice” and “Super-fluid water.”

This new water world is just one of over seven hundred exoplanets that have been discovered so far, each more intriguing than the last.


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