“Water worlds” are incredibly common throughout the Milky Way galaxy, did you know?
According to a recent study, medium-sized alien planets, two to four times the size of Earth, tend to host huge amounts of water. In fact, some of these exotic worlds are probably up to 50% water. (In contrast, our seemingly wet Earth is barely 0.02% water by weight.)
“Our data indicates that about 35% of all known exoplanets that are larger than Earth must be rich in water,” study leader Li Zeng, from the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at the University of California, said in a statement. Harvard (USA). “It was a great surprise to realize that there must be so many water worlds.”
Zeng and his colleagues analyzed data collected by NASA’s Kepler space telescope, which has discovered about 70% of the 3,800 known exoplanets to date, and the European Space Agency’s Gaia spacecraft. The study researchers used this information to develop a model that explains the relationship between an exoplanet’s mass and its radius.
“The beauty of the model is that it explains how the composition relates to the known facts about these planets,” Zeng said.
The team’s model suggests that alien worlds around 1.5 times the size of Earth or smaller tend to be rocky, while those that are slightly larger are generally water worlds. The planets in the next size category are primarily gaseous. For example, Neptune, the smallest gas giant in our solar system, is about four times as wide as Earth.
And it is that our universe is a vast place but rich in planets. In our review of strange planets, we will travel through the coldest planet in the universe, the hottest, the largest, also the smallest, of course, the one with the most radical temperatures, the oldest, the youngest …
Are you ready for this journey through the most unusual cosmos?
