Is there life beyond Earth? Are we alone? Is there a planet that could help survive the future of the human species?
These are some of the questions that guide astronomers in their search for planets outside our solar system, and this time they may have hit the jackpot. A planet has been discovered that could have a very deep ocean. Even more interesting is that it is an Earth-like planet.TOI-1452 b is nearly 100 light-years away and orbits two stars, unlike Earth, which orbits only one sun. The planet is 70 percent larger than Earth and about five times more massive, and astronomers say its density could match that of the deep ocean.No, very deep ocean.
Are there oceans?
An international team of researchers led by the University of Montreal announced the discovery of a Super-Earth in which simulations show that the oceanic world makes up to 30 percent of the planet’s total mass. By comparison, 70 percent of Earth’s water bodies make up just 1 percent of the total mass. “This proportion is comparable to our solar system’s watery moons Jupiter’s Ganymede and Callisto or Saturn’s Titan and Enceladus, which are thought to harbor deep oceans beneath ice shells,” NASA said in a statement. The planet orbits its star in just 11 days, meaning a year here is just 11 days long.
NASA added that the observations suggest that because the red dwarf is smaller and cooler than our Sun, the planet receives a similar amount of light from its star as Venus receives from our Sun, meaning liquid water exists. Meanwhile, the other star in orbit takes about 1,400 years to complete one circle so far.But to prove the existence of water beyond doubt, they need to make more observations. They speculate that the planet could be a giant rock with little or no atmosphere. It could even be a rocky planet with an atmosphere of hydrogen and helium. The planet was found during observations by the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) and ground-based telescopes.
Astronomers hope to study the planet in detail with the James Webb Space Telescope, as TOI-1452 b is only 100 light-years away, which is quite close in astronomical terms.”It’s relatively bright star should allow Webb to pick up the spectrum of starlight shining through its atmosphere, a kind of fingerprint of atmospheric composition. It also appears in a part of the sky, the constellation Draco, that Webb can observe almost any time of the year,” NASA said.
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