Search For Life Turns to Hydrogen-Rich Ocean Worlds
A new type of exoplanet with hydrogen-rich atmospheres and ocean covered surfaces appears to be a boon in the search for life.
While some astronomers are busy searching for a new planet inside our solar system, others are looking outside our solar system, searching not just for planets but for planets that could harbor life. And in a new paper in The Astrophysical Journal, a team of scientists has identified an entirely new class of exoplanets to search for. They are called Hycean worlds, and they have hydrogen-rich atmospheres and are covered in oceans. Hence the name — Hycean is a portmanteau of hydrogen and ocean.
So what makes these planets such a good target in the search for life? Several reasons, actually. First, they are more numerous and easily found than Earth-sized planets because they are up to 2.6 times larger than Earth. That means they block more light from their stars, so if we’re searching for them via the transit method, we’ll find more of them. In this case, we do have an observational bias, but it might work in our favor.
Second, these larger planets are also hotter than Earth, running at about 200 degrees Celsius, but they still can host large oceans and possibly support microbial life similar to what…
