As more and more exoplanets are identified and confirmed by various observational methods, the still-elusive “holy grail” is the discovery of a truly Earthlike world… one of the hallmarks of which is the presence of liquid water.
And while it’s true that water has been identified in the thick atmospheres of “hot Jupiter” exoplanets before , a new technique has now been used to spot its spectral signature in yet another giant world outside our solar system — potentially paving the way for even more such discoveries.
Researchers from Caltech, Penn State University, the Naval Research Laboratory, the University of Arizona, and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics have teamed up in an NSF-funded project to develop a new way to identify the presence of water in exoplanet atmospheres.
Previous methods relied on specific instances such as when the exoplanets — at this point all “hot Jupiters,” gaseous planets that orbit closely to their host stars — were in the process of transiting their stars as viewed from Earth.
http://www.universetoday.com/109731/new-technique-finds-water-in-exoplanet-atmospheres/?utm_content=buffer04690&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer
And while it’s true that water has been identified in the thick atmospheres of “hot Jupiter” exoplanets before , a new technique has now been used to spot its spectral signature in yet another giant world outside our solar system — potentially paving the way for even more such discoveries.
Researchers from Caltech, Penn State University, the Naval Research Laboratory, the University of Arizona, and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics have teamed up in an NSF-funded project to develop a new way to identify the presence of water in exoplanet atmospheres.
Previous methods relied on specific instances such as when the exoplanets — at this point all “hot Jupiters,” gaseous planets that orbit closely to their host stars — were in the process of transiting their stars as viewed from Earth.
http://www.universetoday.com/109731/new-technique-finds-water-in-exoplanet-atmospheres/?utm_content=buffer04690&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer
