Water vapor found on an ‘Earth-sized’ exoplanet 110 light-years from home
Well, this sounds cool. Let's all pack up our spaceships and get going.
Oh darn...
This week, astronomers announced new hope for extraterrestrial habitability: an exoplanet some 110 light-years away from Earth that harbors water in its atmosphere.
The discovery, published in two independent papers published in Nature Astronomy and on the pre-print server arXiv.org, marks the first time researchers have detected an Earth-like planet orbiting a distant star that supports liquid water—a crucial ingredient for life as humans understand it.
Well, this sounds cool. Let's all pack up our spaceships and get going.
But don’t pack your bags just yet.
Oh darn...
While it’s offered up some tantalizing tidbits, the planet, called K2-18b, likely harbors many foreign features, and is 2.5 times larger and eight times more massive than Earth. Such intermediate sized planets don’t always look like Earth, and may actually more closely resemble Neptune—the icy planet that’s one size up in our own solar system.
“K2-18b is not ‘Earth 2.0,’” Angelos Tsiaras, an astronomer at University College London and author of the Nature Astronomy paper, said in a statement. “However, [this] brings us closer to answering the fundamental question: Is the Earth unique?”