(Photo: Wikimedia Commons/Pablo Carlos Budassi)
James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has helped researchers discover another exoplanet in the habitable zone, which has an atmosphere and liquid water.
James Webb Space Telescope Discovers Potentially Habitable Planet
The search for water is akin to searching for habitability elsewhere in the universe. Researchers are left with no option but to adopt the cosmic water trail as their north star in the search for worlds that are mirror images of our own since they have not yet discovered lifeforms that dissociate this material from our idea of "life" itself.
For this reason, scientists were thrilled when they discovered an exoplanet that was likely to contain water -- in particular, liquid water instead of ice or water vapor. A group of scientists recently revealed that a fascinating planet outside the solar system may contain a temperate water ocean roughly half the size of the Atlantic.
Charles Cadieux, a doctoral student at the Université de Montréal and lead author of a paper on the discovery, said in a statement that LHS 1140 b may be our best chance of all the temperate exoplanets currently known to exist. One day, he hopes to indirectly confirm the existence of liquid water on the surface of an alien world outside our solar system. This would represent a significant advancement in the hunt for exoplanets that might support life.
Furthermore, according to Ryan MacDonald, a NASA Sagan Fellow in the Department of Astronomy at the University of Michigan, who assisted in the investigation of LHS 1140 b's atmosphere, this is the first time they have ever observed a trace of an atmosphere on a rocky or ice-rich exoplanet in the habitable zone. He added that researchers may have even discovered indications of "air" in it.
The most significant aspect of LHS 1140 b is that it is located in the "Goldilocks zone," or habitable zone of its red dwarf star, roughly a fifth the size of the sun. It is located 48 light-years from Earth in the constellation Cetus, which, ironically, means "the whale."
This is the region surrounding a star, as suggested by the name, where the temperature is just right, too hot or too cold for a world to support liquid water, but instead meets the criteria that the fairy tale figure Goldilocks lives by.
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JWST Could Detect Technosignatures
NASA's JWST is seemingly making researchers' jobs easier in searching for habitable planets. A recent study suggests that extraterrestrials may have used greenhouse gases to make exoplanets or other planets habitable.
If that's the case, searching for habitable planets will be easier because JWST can detect greenhouse gases. According to lead author Edward Schwieterman of the University of California, Riverside, JWST, and other space-based observatories, a unique signal can be detected even if only one in a million gas molecules takes infrared radiation from its host star.
According to Schwieterman, there would be no need to hunt for these technologies if telescopes already define the planet for other purposes. And it would be simply amazing to find them.
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