NEW YORK: In their quest to find a planet where conditions can lead to the proliferation of life, astronomers have discovered water vapor on the exoplanet K2-18b.
Results from the Kepler satellite mission, which discovered nearly 2/3 of all known exoplanets to date, indicate that 5 to 20 percent of Earths and super-Earths are located in the habitable zone of their stars.
However, despite this abundance, probing the conditions and atmospheric properties on any of these habitable zone planets is extremely difficult and has remained elusive… until now.
A new study by Professor Bjorn Benneke of the Institute for Research on Exoplanets at the Universite de Montreal, his doctoral student Caroline Piaulet and several of their collaborators reports the detection of water vapor and perhaps even liquid water clouds in the atmosphere of the planet K2-18b.
(Agencies)
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