ASTRONOMERS JUST DISCOVERED A PLANET MADE OF WATER

According to NASA, water could be the key to finding life. There aren’t many qualities that are true of all life on Earth, but the need for water is one of them. Life is possible on Earth because of water. It’s in all living things, whether they live at the bottom of the ocean or the driest desert.

As a result of this, scientists who search for life on other planets think our best bet for finding life is to search for water.

And recently, astronomers may have identified a potential planet covered in water!

So what is this exoplanet?

How were astronomers able to discover it?

And most importantly, is it possible there is life on this water planet?

The name is Planet TOI-1452 b. It was identified by a team of researchers from the University of Montreal using TESS and the Observatoire du Mont-Mégantic (OMM) observatory, as a ‘super-Earth’ class of planets. The planet is orbiting a binary system of red dwarfs, the end of the line for one of the smallest classes of stars. The planet is at a short distance away from the main star, its ‘year’ lasting only 11 days but is still in the habitable zone where liquid water could exist because the star’s luminosity and heat are quite low.

What this means in essence is that this planet, though still possessing a rocky territorial and characteristically not as huge as Uranus and Neptune (the ice giants) nor Saturn and Jupiter (the gas giants) is very much more gigantic than Earth.

TOI-1452b is said to be 5 times more massive than Earth, and yet 70 percent larger. It is this inordinate density that led scientists to believe that this exoplanet may possess some astonishingly deep oceans.

Weirdly enough, it would take us a century to reach planet TOI-1452b that is if we are traveling at the speed of light (which is realistically impossible) as this planet is about 100 light years away. So it is to some extent nearby in our cosmic region.

But how did astronomers discover this incredible water exoplanet?

All of the planets in our solar system orbit around the Sun. Planets that orbit around other stars are called exoplanets. Exoplanets are very hard to see directly with telescopes. They are hidden by the bright glare of the stars they orbit.

So, astronomers use other ways to detect and study these distant planets. They search for exoplanets by looking at the effects these planets have on the stars they orbit.

One way to search for exoplanets is to look for "wobbly" stars. A star that has planets doesn’t orbit perfectly around its center. From far away, this off-center orbit makes the star look like it's wobbling.

According to NASA, over 78 percent of the 3,700 confirmed exoplanets have been discovered using transits. Which basically implies measuring the dimming of a star that happens to have a planet pass in front of it. The other way planets were discovered is by monitoring the spectrum of a star for the tell-tale signs of a planet pulling on its star and causing its light to gently Doppler shift.

Interestingly, the last major exoplanet search spacecraft, Kepler, found over 2,600 exoplanets by watching for transits. Most of them were orbiting distant (read: dim!) stars 300 to 3,000 light-years from Earth.

To date, more than 5,000 exoplanets have been discovered and are considered "confirmed" out of the billions in our galaxy alone. There are thousands of other "candidate" exoplanet detections that require further observations to say for sure whether or not the exoplanet is real.

In the case of planet TOI-1452b, it was NASA’s space telescope TESS, which surveys the entire sky in search of planetary systems close to our own, that alerted the researchers about this very planet. Astronomers were able to predict its 70 percent larger than Earth's size through the TESS signal which indicated a subtle decrease in brightness every 11 days.

The team of astronomers led by Charles Cadieux who majorly does ground follow-up observations of candidates identified by TESS to confirm their planet type and characteristics used PESTO a camera installed on the Observatoire du Mont-Mégantic’s (OMM) telescope that was developed by Universite de Montreal Professor David Lafreniere and his Ph.D. student Francois-Rene Lachapelle to detect this phenomenal exoplanet. The OMM played a crucial role in confirming the nature of this signal and estimating planet TOI-1452b’s radius. According to Cadieux, it wasn’t necessarily a routine check. They had to make sure the signal detected by TESS was really caused by an exoplanet circling TOI-1452, the larger of the two stars in that binary system.

The host star TOI-1452 is much smaller than our Sun and is one of two stars of similar size in the binary system. The two stars orbit each other and are separated by such a small distance — 97 astronomical units, or about two and a half times the distance between the Sun and Pluto — that the TESS telescope sees them as a single point of light. But PESTO’s resolution is high enough to distinguish the two objects, and the images showed that the exoplanet does orbit TOI-1452, which was confirmed through subsequent observations by a Japanese team

Researchers Étienne Artigau and Neil Cook, also with iREx at the Université de Montréal, played a key role in analyzing the data. They developed a powerful analytic method capable of detecting the planet in the data collected with SPIRou. Using the line-by-line method to clean the data obtained with SPIRou of many parasite signals and to reveal the weak signature of planets such as the TOI-1452b.

Though presumably rocky like Earth, however, planet TOI-1452 b has radius, mass, and density that is considered a totally different world to ours. Earth is essentially a very dry planet; even though we sometimes call it the Blue Planet because about 70% of its surface is covered by ocean, water actually only makes up a negligible fraction of its mass — less than 1%.

Apparently, some exoplanets may have water in abundance. Astronomers have in recent years, tried to identify and determine the radius and mass of many exoplanets with size between that of Earth and Neptune which is about 3.8 times larger than Earth. Interestingly, some of these planets have a density that can only be explained if a large fraction of their mass is made up of lighter materials than those that make up the internal structure of the Earth such as water. And these indeterminate creations have been labeled “ocean planets.”

So far, TOI-1452 b can be said to be one of the best contenders for an ocean planet that has been found to date. For a planet that, just like Earth is essentially made up of rock and metal, its mass and radius tend to be of much lower density than expected.

Furthermore, exoplanets interior modeling specialists at the University of Toronto, Mykhalo Plotnykov and Diana Valencia analyzed TOI-1452 b as one in which water may make up as much as 30% of its mass, a proportion similar to that of some natural satellites in our Solar System, like Jupiter’s moons and Saturn’s moons.

Strangely, the planet is not the closest super-Earth that we know of, Proxima Centauri b is one planet just over 4 light years away and technically in the habitable zone. However, Planet TOI-1452 is one exoplanet that is both close enough and may be full of water.

The truth is, that water is the key to sustaining life anywhere. 71 percent of the surface of our planet is covered by oceans which contains a whopping 96.5 percent of the water on earth. And at any given time, about 0.001 percent is floating above us in the atmosphere. Meaning, that if all of that water fell as rain at once, the whole planet would get about 1 inch of rain. Such is the huge and important presence of water on a planet such as ours.

The fact is, further studies of Planet TOI-1452 b are needed to confirm the presence of water on its surface along with other details, such as the chances of life on it, etc.

For this, an exoplanet such as TOI-1452 b is a perfect candidate for further observation with the James Webb Space Telescope. It is one of the few known temperate planets that exhibit characteristics consistent with an ocean planet. It is close enough to Earth that researchers can hope to study its atmosphere and test this hypothesis. And, luckily for us, it is located in an area of the sky that the telescope can observe year-round.

Eventually, if this exoplanet which is only 100 light-years away from us is finally verified, might make the supply of liquid water and a favourable environment, and this would in turn be a suitable situation for the start of life. And pretty soon, the James Webb Space Telescope would be able to determine if TOI-1452 b is indeed a water planet. The JWS Telescope has such very high-resolution infrared spectrometers which are perfect for determining the caliber of extraterrestrial plants and their atmosphere

Already, a team of astronomers is queued up, and in line to submit an application to get observation time on the James Webb Space Telescope. Obviously, to fully comprehend TOI-1452 b, it is very important and crucial to do some critical observations with the Webb telescope