Thursday, February 23, 2012

science blogs

Waterworld Discovered in Space

Category: Cosmos
Posted on: February 23, 2012 8:19 AM, by Greg Laden
... Well, everything is in space, but I mean outer space!
Observations by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have come up with a new class of planet, a waterworld enshrouded by a thick, steamy atmosphere. It's smaller than Uranus but larger than Earth.
Zachory Berta of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) and colleagues made the observations of the planet GJ1214b.
"GJ1214b is like no planet we know of," Berta said. "A huge fraction of its mass is made up of water."
The ground-based MEarth Project, led by CfA's David Charbonneau, discovered GJ1214b in 2009. This super-Earth is about 2.7 times Earth's diameter and weighs almost seven times as much. It orbits a red-dwarf star every 38 hours at a distance of 1.3 million miles, giving it an estimated temperature of 450 degrees Fahrenheit.
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    1
    Space is fascinating, and it is awesome that we are finding planets such as this one. They are getting closer and closer to finding life on another planet.
    Posted by: Caleb Hall | February 23, 2012 2:17 PM
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