A water-rich superearth found 40 lightyears away

Source – PuneMirror

Washington: A research team from Japan has used the Subaru Telescope to observe the water-rich atmosphere of a super-earth, 40 lightyears from our planet.

The astronomers and planetary scientists has used Subaru Telescope’s two optical cameras, Suprime-Cam and the Faint Object Camera and Spectrograph (FOCAS), with a blue transmission filter to observe planetary transits of super-Earth GJ 1214 b (Gliese 1214 b). 

The team investigated whether this planet has an atmosphere rich in water or hydrogen. The Subaru observations show that the sky of this planet does not show a strong Rayleigh scattering feature, which a cloudless hydrogendominated atmosphere would predict. 

When combined with the findings of previous observations in other colors, this new observational result implies that GJ 1214 b is likely to have a water-rich atmosphere. GJ 1214 b is located in the constellation Ophiuchus, northwest of the center of our Milky Way galaxy.

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