Water Worlds: They're really out there
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Far beyond Earth, a new type of alien water planet could be speckling our galaxy by the billions, like cosmic dew drops.
These “Hycean Planets” range up to ten times the mass of the Earth, containing mega-oceans that could stretch down hundreds of kilometers.
Their extreme pressures keep their water liquid across a wide range of temperatures, broadening the zone in which they could host life. And researchers now believe that these worlds are extremely common in the universe.
Soon we will get our first peek into the atmosphere of a possible Hycean world, K2-18b, thanks to the James Webb Space Telescope. What secrets will these ocean worlds reveal? Is something out there, swimming freely in an ocean more vast that we can imagine?