Water discovered on distant exoplanet

Water vapor has been discovered on an exoplanet the size of Neptune – smaller than any previous discovery – paving the way for astronomers to use similar methods to identify Earth-like planets far beyond our solar system, Russia Today reports.

This marks the first time that an exoplanet smaller than the size of Jupiter has been revealed to feature traces of water, according to the findings first published in the latest edition of the journal Nature.

Analyzed using the Hubble Space Telescope, the Spitzer Space Telescope and the Kepler space observatory, the composition of the exoplanet’s atmosphere was found to be primarily hydrogen along with roughly 25 percent water vapor.


Known as HAT-P-11b, the exoplanet located 124 light years away was not described as a potentially Earth-like habitat by the study’s lead author, Jonathan Fraine, but the fact that water vapor was discovered at all was seen as a hopeful sign for the future.

“Although this planet is not classically habitable, it reveals to us that when we find Earth 2.0, we will be able to use this technique, transmission spectroscopy, to understand its atmosphere and determine the quality of life available on its shores,” Fraine told the Guardian.


Typically, warm planets smaller than Jupiter – such as HAT-P-11b – have been extremely difficult to analyze due to the abundance of clouds, which kept light from breaking through and giving scientists little to effectively examine, at least with current technology. Since there was no such interference on this planet, researchers were able to clearly determine that water vapor existed in the atmosphere.


“Water is the most cosmically abundant molecule that we can directly observe in exoplanets, and we expect it to be prevalent in the upper atmospheres of planets at these temperatures,” Fraine added toSpace.com. “Detecting it is both a confirmation of our theories and revealing for the bulk of the spectrum that we can observe.”
 

Read more on the Russia Today website.