A Wet, Warm World
Meet the first exoplanet discovered within the habitable zone of its star with confirmed water in its atmosphere: K2–18b
If water is a requirement for life, have we just found our first best candidate for extraterrestrial habitation?
K2–18b is the second world out from its sun, a red dwarf star, in a solar system 111 light years away from Earth.
It is considered a “super-Earth”, many times our own planet’s mass.
At over 100 light years distant, it would take us, using current space travel technology, a bit over 1,000 years to send a probe there to investigate the planet up close. We would need to wait another 111 years to receive any data back from the probe. A current NASA project is developing a tiny probe that could potentially reach 1/5 lightspeed, cutting our wait time nearly in half.
This new discovery was published in Nature Astronomy.
K2–18b’s atmosphere contains water vapor, and also orbits its star (K2–18) at a distance that allows for…
