Astronomers Discover a NEW Type Of Planet! WHAT'S THERE?

 

For the very first time astronomers in a groundbreaking study now believe that our search for extraterrestrial life has been severely limited by assuming that habitable worlds must resemble our earth and we even have a great candidate to study a nearby alien world extremely different and larger than ours high sea and planets with vast liquid water oceans and a hydrogen-rich atmosphere and possibly life welcome the Science Reads in today's article we explore the chances that these wondrous exoplanets are not only abundant but have life quite different

 from what we see around us

 as we close in on Webb opening its golden eye to the universe an equally golden opportunity to search for extraterrestrial life is coming with it and now we know just where to look Astronomers for decades have used earth as a model for what is needed to sustain life and that is understandable at first however some now believe this search is far too limited enter a new class of exoplanets the Hycean these are in between a rocky world and a gas giant with thick atmospheres covering vast oceans the name hycean which combines hydrogen and ocean has not been formally adopted by astronomers who decide that kind of thing but it'll do for now Nikku Madhusudhan of Cambridge’s Institute of Astronomy began suspecting while studying super earths that potential life-sustaining worlds are being overlooked theorizing that the heavy atmospheres and sizes of these alien exoplanets may enable liquid water to abound at higher temperatures than previously theorized Madhusudhan who both led the research and coined the name says these worlds are a whole new avenue to search for life away from earth essentially when we've been looking

 for these various molecular signatures we have been focusing on planets similar to earth which is a reasonable place to start he explains but we think high sea and planets offer a better chance of finding several trace bio signatures when astronomers previously established if an exoplanet is habitable they cut off the list with any that are above the boiling point because as they quickly note you will evaporate the entire ocean but the new study shows that with hydrogen-rich atmospheres these worlds with large amounts of water can exist even at enormously high temperatures extremes where life can also be found on earth despite being very unearth-like Madhusudhan's team concluded these exoplanets could host microbial life of our own extremophiles after all our home world features beings that thrive in acids salt extreme cold and even radiation some can suspend their metabolism for years when conditions are too radical or toxic and then revive themselves when their environment becomes livable again these organisms are already known to develop and survive in extreme conditions and hycean planets feature both water and hydrogen-rich atmospheres that are potentially life-sustaining the study placed exoplanets in this category that are up to 2.6 times larger than earth and with atmospheric temperatures ranging from earth-like up to almost 392 degrees Fahrenheit hyceans have at least 10 percent of their mass in water with massive and even planet-wide oceans the study concluded that these conditions are likely to allow for biological organisms throw out what you think you know

 about life-sustaining planets

 the hyceans are anything but ordinary and are an incredibly diverse class of alien worlds some are so close to their host star that they are tidally locked as the moon is to earth with one side blazing hot in perpetual daylight and the other brutally cold and dark others orbit so far from their star that they receive precious little radiation so far out that the slightest nudge might bump them into the cosmos as eternal wanderers of the thousands of exoplanets now discovered many are between the size of earth and Neptune so astronomers refer to them as super earths and many Neptunes some are rocky and others are ice giants or anywhere in between and until recently researchers thought they were uninhabitable due to extreme conditions many orbits small and dim red dwarf stars which are far more common than those like our sun the search for extraterrestrial life has centered on exoplanets that occupy what astronomers call the Goldilock Zone meaning not too

 hot and not too cold for liquid water

 and if looking for cosmic duplicates of ourselves that's a great place to start but what if that focus is instead preventing us from finding life elsewhere in the universe the Cambridge Institute of Astronomy team decided to expand the horizons of worlds to study to include those with temperatures up

 to 248 degrees Fahrenheit and under

 pressures of about 1,000 bar think barometric pressure that weather forecasters like to use not precisely the same but very close earth for comparison has a standard pressure of 1.01325 bar adopting these new parameters for extraterrestrial life brings an incredible number of exoplanets into the search for example if earth

 were moved just beyond the orbit of Mars the Cambridge team says our greenhouse gases would freeze out and we would be in for a snowy winter to put it mildly habitable high sea in worlds have no such limitations they can even be what astronomers call rogue planets not tied to a star at all their hydrogen atmospheres would theoretically enable life to exist even in the cold and dark cosmos here's some great news they are much

 easier to find than worlds like our own they are mostly larger and their habitable zone is far wider than our own because of that size normally astronomers search for exoplanets using the tried and true transit method which watches for signs that a planet passes between its star and the earth observer causing the light to dim there is a bonus to this method in that researchers can study the light of the star as it passes through the exoplanet's atmosphere and learn a great deal about the atmosphere's chemical makeup water vapor is a molecule that gives tell-tale signs to the observer as do certain biosignatures like oxygen and methane the James Webb space telescope is expected to make tremendous advances in the study of exoplanet atmospheres nothing researchers have used up until now comes close to bringing home the precise data from the infrared spectrum that Webb will provide the transit method however presents challenges when limiting observations to earth-like exoplanets orbiting sun-like stars the size differential between the two means the planet is quite difficult to first detect and then study this has reduced the search for signs of atmospheres on exoplanets to those of similar size as earth but orbiting much smaller dwarf stars the quest to find hycean and exoplanets is easier for several reasons including their vast numbers but also their size relative to their host's stars also the hycean exoplanets higher atmospheric temperatures and larger radii make the biomarkers astronomers look for easier to find than in earth-sized rocky worlds and for the first time we have found a very viable candidate in 2019 strong buzz erupted around the first discovery of water vapor in the atmosphere of a potentially habitable super earth k2-18b located a relatively nearby 124 light years from us astronomers quickly countered media reports breathlessly announcing a prime candidate for life elsewhere they clarified that k2-18b is more of a mini Neptune than a super earth meaning that even though it does have confirmed water vapor in its atmosphere it likely has a deep atmosphere of hydrogen and or helium and may also lack a solid surface so not very earth-like and the old life as we know it parameters require a rocky surface with oceans of liquid water but that was then now astronomers believe k2-18b not only has water vapor but also liquid water on its surface using the Kepler Space Telescope the Hubble Space Telescope and the now decommissioned Spitzer Space Telescope astronomers found clues of a rocky core on k2-18b in a study published in the astrophysical journal letters the research team at the Cambridge institute of astronomy used atmospheric data to determine that while k2-18b may be closer to the size of a mini Neptune it very likely is a rocky world or even an ocean world both of which point to habitability for life the hydrogen envelope of k2-1ab became their focal point a study co-author Matthew Nixon details we wanted to know the thickness of the hydrogen envelope how deep the hydrogen goes while this is a question with

 multiple solutions we've shown

 that you don't need much hydrogen to

 explain all the observations together

 meaning our focus has been far too

 narrow in searching for life elsewhere it may not be long before Webb shows us just how crowded our galaxy really is is it exciting to contemplate that nearby countless neighbors of ours may harbor microbial life what do you think about these potentially habitable worlds will Webb be able to pinpoint a super earth and if so will we ever find out tell us in the comments