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Here are the ocean planets. There may be life on them.
Their name, the Hycean planets, comes from a combination of the words hydrogen and ocean. Recently, the Astrophysical Journal published a very interesting article about them. It seems that they may be hiding life.
It all started in 2015, when the Kepler Space Telescope as part of its extended mission — K2 — discovered at a distance of 124 light years from us a planet K2–18b orbiting very close to its parent star (we wrote about it in the text “Not for us exoplanets” in June 2020). Information about the discovery was made public a year later, in 2016. Now sky researchers from the University of Cambridge took K2–18b under the magnifying glass, and besides, they found many planets similar to it in the space of our Galaxy. They have been called Hycean planets, hyceans, or simply ocean planets.
K2–18b. Lots of water in space
There are quite a few of these in our Galaxy. They represent an entirely new group of exoplanets, outside of Earth-type alien planets, that may be conducive to the origin and persistence of life. K2–18b is a mini-Neptune-type planet, meaning it is nearly nine times more massive than Earth, with a radius of 2.6 Earth radii. It orbits its parent star — a red dwarf much smaller than the Sun — in the ecological zone, which means its surface temperature is fairly close…
