Exoplanets With Frozen Surfaces May Have Oceans Beneath Their Icy Shells To Host Extraterrestrial Life [Study]

Extraterrestrials could still thrive even in exoplanets with icy outer shells. A new study just gave the search for alien life a boost.

Exoplanet With Icy Outer Shells Can Host Extraterrestrial Life

Exoplanets may have liquid water, a necessary component for life on Earth, considerably more frequently than previously thought, according to a recent study.

Therefore, there may be more habitable planets than previously thought in the universe, and there is a greater likelihood that these planets have settings where alien life may evolve, even if they have icy outer shells, per Space.com.

According to study author and scientist Lujendra Ojha of Rutgers University, they are aware that liquid water is necessary for life. Their research demonstrates that water can be found in locations they hadn't really thought about. Finding conditions where life may theoretically develop is now much more likely.

Ojha and colleagues discovered that exoplanets with frozen surfaces are nonetheless capable of having liquid water oceans beneath their surface.

Prior to taking into account the underground water, it was thought that roughly one rocky planet [in] every 100 stars would have liquid water, according to Ojha. Based on the new model, this might go close to one planet per star under the correct circumstances. Thus, liquid water is a hundredfold more probable to be found than they originally thought.

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How Icy Exoplanets Hold Liquid Water?

Red dwarf stars, which are smaller and cooler than the sun and are the most prevalent form of stars in our galaxy, were the focus of the researchers' investigation into planets. The bulk of Earth-like rocky worlds have been discovered orbiting red dwarf stars, also known as M-dwarfs, which account for around 70% of the stars in the Milky Way.

The first method is visible on Earth. The scientists investigated two ways that rocky planets with an icy crust could be heated from below, enabling them to preserve beneath liquid water.

Ojida said we are fortunate to live on Earth right now because the atmosphere has the ideal concentration of greenhouse gases to keep liquid water steady on the surface. The average world surface temperature would be roughly - 18 degrees Celsius [minus 0.4 degrees Fahrenheit] if greenhouse gases were to disappear and the majority of surface liquid water would completely freeze. This truly occurred on our planet a few billion years ago, when the liquid water on the surface solidified. It does not imply that the water was fully solid everywhere, though.

At that moment in Earth's history, radioactivity from deep inside the planet heated the liquid water to preserve it. According to Ojha, heat from radioactivity deep in the Earth can reheat the water to a temperature that keeps it liquid.

In spite of the extreme cold, there are sizable subsurface lakes of liquid water that are kept from freezing by the heat produced by radioactivity in regions like Antarctica and the Canadian Arctic.

They simulated the possibility of producing and maintaining liquid water on exoplanets circling M-dwarf stars by merely taking the planet's heat production into account. They discovered that a much higher proportion of these exoplanets than they had anticipated are likely to contain enough heat to maintain liquid water when one considers the potential of liquid water being created by radioactivity.

The results of the study were published in the journal Nature.