(ORDO NEWS) — In a recent study presented in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, an international team of scientists is exploring the possibility of water worlds around M-class dwarf stars.
Water worlds are planets that have pools of liquid water either directly on the surface, like Earth, or somewhere under it, like Europa and Enceladus.
The researchers focused on super-Earths and sub-Neptunes with atmospheres containing hydrogen and helium.
Scientists looked at exoplanets that orbit M-dwarfs in an attempt to calculate their total mass of water.
“Planets with a significant portion of the total mass (10-50%) is water, may be extremely rare or not exist at all,” said Dr. James Owen, senior lecturer in exoplanet physics at Imperial College London and co-author of the study.
“This could mean that planet formation occurs fairly uniformly over a wide range of stellar masses, forming a single type of planet: terrestrial worlds that received a few percent of their hydrogen gas from the accretion disk around a young star.”
Ultimately, the researchers concluded that populations of aquatic worlds remain elusive for the time being.
For more convincing results, the scientists propose to search for hydrogen and helium around low-mass exoplanets and measure the exoplanet’s age to better determine their long-term evolution.
“This will come from JWST (James Webb Space Telescope) observations of sub-Neptunes – if the results are consistent with large mass fractions of water in their atmosphere (i.e. vapor atmosphere), then this means that the planets are indeed water worlds,” said Dr. James Rogers, PhD student at the University of California and lead author of the study.
“However, if the atmospheres are consistent with H/He dominance, then that means they are not water worlds.”
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