An international team of astronomers has used nearly three years of high precision data from NASA’s Kepler spacecraft to make the first observations of a planet outside our solar system that’s smaller than Mercury, the smallest planet orbiting our sun.
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When astronomers discovered planet GJ 1214b circling a star more than 47 light-years from Earth in 2009, their data presented two possibilities. Either it was a mini-Neptune shrouded in a thick atmosphere of hydrogen and helium, or it was a water world nearly three times the size of Earth.
Astronomer Jacob Bean used a new method called multi-object spectroscopy to analyze the planet’s atmosphere from large, ground-based telescopes. He says, "We’re trying to distinguish whether it’s like the gas giants we know about, or something fundamentally different from what we’ve seen in our solar system–an atmosphere predominantly composed of water."
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It’s a potentially habitable planet that’s orbiting a nearby star, that’s capable of having liquid water and thus supporting life as we know it.
In the Huffington Post, Mike Wall quotes astronomer Steve Vogt as saying, "This discovery is in keeping with our emerging view that virtually every star has planets, and that the galaxy must have many such potentially habitable Earth-sized planets. They are everywhere, even right next door."
He quotes astronomer Mikko Tuomi as saying, "It is impossible to tell the composition, but I do not consider this particular planet to be very likely to have a rocky surface. It might be a ‘water world,’ but at the moment it’s anybody’s guess."
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Lately, astronomers have been searching for life on the MOONS of planets, but they’ve also discovered a new planet–one that wandering through the galaxy "homeless," rather than orbiting around a star.
Researcher Jonathan Gagné says, "Over the past few years, several objects of this type have been identified, but their existence could not be established (before)."
Astrophysicist Étienne Artigau says, "Although theorists had established the existence of this type of very cold and young planet, one had never been observed until (now)."
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