Possible alien life found on newly-discovered 'Earth'
We have become obsessed with discovering life on other planets and this time we might be pretty close to confirming this theory.
If you've heard this once, you've heard it a million times, but this time researchers are working harder to prove that there is indeed life on other planets in our universe.
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The newly-discovered distant exoplanet, known as K2-18b, is being called a ‘Super Earth’ because it is made up of rock, just like our planet, and this planet has a neighbour where it is believed that there is alien life.
A team of researchers has found that it is a mostly rocky planet with a gaseous atmosphere, like that of Earth’s, and it is a water planet with a thick layer of ice on top of it. Where there is water there is life, right?!
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The new planet will be a prime target for NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope when it launches in 2019.
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Lead author of the research project Ryan Cloutier had this to say:
Being able to measure the mass and density of K2-18b was tremendous, but to discover a new exoplanet was lucky and equally exciting. If you can get the mass and radius, you can measure the bulk density of the planet and that can tell you what the bulk of the planet is made of. With the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) we can probe the atmosphere and see whether it has an extensive atmosphere or it’s a planet covered in water.
Maybe, just maybe in our lifetime we might just be able to prove that people were not making up stories about life on other planets?
The twin @NASAVoyager took some of the 1st up-close images of planets in our solar system. Take a look: https://t.co/v5BZ6yxCIX #Voyager40 pic.twitter.com/qL1PTYSr0c
— NASA (@NASA) September 3, 2017