Two worlds orbiting a tiny star 218 light-years away appear to be of a kind unlike anything we have in our Solar System.
Working out what planets outside our Solar System are made of usually requires quite a bit of detective work. They're very far away and very dim compared to the light of the stars they orbit; direct images are very hard to obtain and subsequently very rare, and don't show much detail.
The amount of starlight that gets blocked by the transit tells us the size of the exoplanet, from which we get a radius. Radial velocity is induced by the gravitational tug of the exoplanet, seen as a regular but very small expansion and contraction of the wavelength of the star's light as it gets pulled about. The amplitude of this movement can tell us how much mass an exoplanet has.or even Neptune, will have a relatively low density.
"Imagine larger versions of Europa or Enceladus, the water-rich moons orbiting Jupiter and Saturn, but brought much closer to their star,"of the University of Montreal, who led the research."Instead of an icy surface, Kepler-138c and d would harbor large water-vapor envelopes." According to the team's modeling, water would make up more than 50 percent of the exoplanets' volume, extending down to a depth of about 2,000 kilometers . Earth's oceans, for context, have an average depth ofBut Kepler-138c and Kepler-138d are much closer to their star than Earth. Although that star is a small, cool red dwarf, that proximity would make the two exoplanets much, much hotter than our world.
"The temperature in Kepler-138c's and Kepler-138d's atmospheres is likely above the boiling point of water, and we expect a thick, dense atmosphere made of steam on these planets,""Only under that steam atmosphere there could potentially be liquid water at high pressure, or even water in another phase that occurs at high pressures, called a supercritical fluid."
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