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WATER WORLDS

Exoplanet “Water Worlds”

Could Hold Unfathomably
Deep Alien Oceans
/ Futurism “Unfathomable. Bottomless. Very Deep.”
/ The Byte
Victor
Victor Tangermann
Tangermann May 1st 2019

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Topics Scientists have already spotted thousands of

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exoplanets — planets that orbit a star outside of
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 the Solar System — and many have the potential to
harbor life
life.

A wild new theory suggests that exoplanets two to

four times the size of Earth, known as “sub-
Neptunes,” are likely to be water worlds rather
than gas dwarfs — and their oceans could be so
deep that they almost defy comprehension.

Instead of a few kilometers deep, like Earth’s

oceans, Harvard researcher Li Zeng said that these
alien oceans could be “hundreds or thousands of
kilometers” in depth, according to Gizmodo
Gizmodo.
“Unfathomable. Bottomless. Very Deep.”

Ice Limit

The new research, published in the journal

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, used

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 a complex computer model that examined data
collected by the Kepler Space Telescope — NASA’s
exoplanet hunting device — and the Gaia mission,
the European Space Agency’s space telescope.

The results are astonishing: the ndings indicate

that some exoplanets may contain “as much as 50
percent water.” That’s vastly more than on Earth,
where water takes up just 0.02 percent of the
planet’s mass. The pressure would be so dizzyingly
high, in fact, that much of the water would turn to
hard ice.

“It was a huge surprise to realize that there must be

so many water-worlds,” Zeng said in a 2018 press Read This Next
release.
release OFF WORLD

SpaceX Just Launched

NASA’s Exoplanet-
READ MORE: Water Worlds Could Have Mind- Hunting Telescope (Gee
Bogglingly Deep Oceans, New Models Suggest
[Gizmodo] I Wonder What They’ll
Find)

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 HARD SCIENCE

To Understand The
More on exoplanets: New Method Could Help Atmospheres Of Distant
Astronomers Find Life-Supporting Exoplanets Exoplanets, Look To
Your Car Engine

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