A space telescope has detected the strongest evidence yet that water — the essential ingredient for any life we know — exists on a gassy planet orbiting a star far from our solar system.
It’s unlikely that such a huge and massive object — a planet larger even than Jupiter — could be home for anything alive, but it does increase astronomers’ confidence that life is just waiting to be detected on smaller, rocky planets in “habitable zones” around suns like ours.
A report on the discovery is published today in the journal Nature by scientists who monitor images and data sent to Earth from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, which has been in orbit around the sun for the past five years.
A team of astronomers, including Carl J. Grillmair of the California Institute of Technology’s Spitzer Science Center and David Charbonneau of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, confirmed in their report what other observations had suggested, that the brightly shining planet 63 light-years from Earth indeed holds abundant water vapor.
That’s not surprising. Measurements show that this huge planet is brilliantly hot, with a temperature of more than 1,700 degrees Fahrenheit. The Spitzer telescope “sees” objects in the infrared frequencies, and the scientists confirmed the presence of water vapor on the planet by analyzing those frequencies.
The planet is one of more than 300 “extrasolar” planets that have been discovered since astronomers found the first one in 1995, and now astronomers are excited that it contains water.
“These new observations bear witness to the robust nature of water in the universe,” Geoffrey Marcy of the University of California at Berkeley, a pioneer in this worldwide, planet-hunting community, said in an e-mail. “Who could doubt that on a gentler, lukewarm planet, water would also likely exist and serve as a cocktail mixer for life.”
