A new study has emerged suggesting that many more planets may have large amounts of water than previously thought, as much as half water and half rock. But, here’s the catch! All that water is in all likelihood embedded in the rock, rather than flowing as oceans or rivers on the surface.
Rafael Luque, first author on the new paper and a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago said, “it was a surprise to see evidence for so many water worlds orbiting the most common type of star in the galaxy. It has enormous consequences for the search for habitable planets.”
With the help of better telescope instruments, scientists are finding signs of more and more planets in distant solar systems, even as a larger sample size helps scientists identify demographic patterns, this is similar to how looking at the population of an entire town can reveal trends that are hard to see at an individual level.
Luque, along with co-author Enric Palle of the Institute of Astrophysics of the Canary Islands and the University of La Laguna, decided to take a population-level look at a group of planets that are seen around a type of star called an M-dwarf. These stars are the most common stars we see around us in the galaxy, and scientists have catalogued dozens of planets around them so far, news agency ANI report said.
However, as stars are so much brighter than their planets, actual planets are not visible, instead, scientists detect faint signs of the planets’ effects on their stars — the shadow created when a planet crosses in front of its star, or the tiny tug on a star’s motion as a planet orbits and that means many questions remain about what these planets actually look like, according to ANI report.
“The two different ways to discover planets each give you different information,” said Palle. By catching the shadow created when a planet crosses in front of its star, scientists can find the diameter of the planet. By measuring the tiny gravitational pull that a planet exerts on a star, scientists can find its mass. By combining the two measurements, scientists can get a sense of the makeup of the planet. Perhaps it’s a big-but-airy planet made mostly out of gas like Jupiter, or a small, dense, rocky planet like Earth.
These analyses had been done for individual planets, but much more rarely for the entire known population of such planets in the Milky Way galaxy. As the scientists looked at the numbers — 43 planets in all — they saw a surprising picture emerging. The densities of a large percentage of the planets suggested that they were too light for their size to be made up of pure rock. Instead, these planets are probably something like half rock and half water, or another lighter molecule.
(With inputs from ANI)
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