There Could be as Many Water Worlds as Earths in the Milky Way universetoday storybywill
in southern Spain. This allowed them to obtain accurate measurements of the sizes and masses of these planets, from which their mass-fraction could be constrained. Their analysis found that a significant portion had densities that were too light in relation to their size to be composed entirely of rock.
However, planets around M-type stars typically orbit so closely that they are tidally locked, where one side is constantly facing toward its sun. At this distance, any water on the planet’s surface would likely exist in a supercritical gas phase, increasing their sizes. As a result, Luque and Pallé theorized that in this population, water is bound to the rock or in closed volumes below the surface, not in the form of oceans, lakes, and rivers on the surface.
Given that they are tidally locked to their suns, these planets may also have liquid oceans on their sun-facing side but frozen surfaces everywhere else – colloquially known as “.” While astronomers have speculated about the existence of this class of exoplanet, these findings constitute the first confirmation for this new type of exoplanet. They also bolster the growing case for water worlds that form beyond the so-called “snow line” in star systems , then migrate closer to their star.
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