Icy ‘Earth-like’ planet discovered, could be home to extraterrestrials

US space agency NASA With the help of K-Web telescope, scientists have discovered an icy ‘super-earth’, where aliens may exist.

When researchers first discovered the planet, known as LHS 1140b, they thought it might be a much smaller version of the nearby gas planet Neptune.

But new research using NASA data suggests it may have an atmosphere and possibly even liquid water.

Researchers say this might make it one of the more promising places to look for aliens.

LHS 1140 b orbits a low-mass red dwarf star, regarding one-fifth the size of our own Sun. It’s interesting to scientists because they think it might be in the ‘Goldilocks zone’, where it’s neither too close nor too far from its star and might therefore contain liquid water.

Liquid water is considered one of the basic necessities for life, at least as it exists on Earth.

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From their research, scientists have estimated that 20% of the world’s mass consists of water. So it may look like a huge snowball, but the planet has an ocean in front of the sun.

“Of all the currently known temperate planets, LHS 1140b is the most likely we will ever see from our own solar system,” says lead author of the new study, Charles Cadeaux, from the Université de Montréal. Be able to confirm the presence of liquid water on the surface of an outer planet.’

But researchers will need a lot of time to confirm whether this world really has an Earth-like atmosphere and liquid water. Even NASA’s Webb Telescope, with its unprecedented sensitivity, would struggle to see it, but they hope that with further work it will be able to pick up signals indicating the presence of carbon dioxide, which is a carbon dioxide gas. The presence of dioxide will be indicated, indicating that it is habitable.

Professor Rene Duion, who supervised the work, said: ‘Finding an Earth-like atmosphere on a temperate planet is a difficult challenge for the Webb telescope. It is possible, but we need a lot of time to observe.

‘Further data are needed to confirm current indications of a nitrogen-enriched atmosphere. We need at least another year of observations to confirm that LHS 1140b has an atmosphere and possibly another two or three years to detect carbon dioxide.’

A paper describing the results, ‘Transmission Spectroscopy of the Habitable Zone Exoplanet LHS 1140 b with JWST/NIRISS’ is available on RXIV and will be published soon in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.