'My students joke that we tried for the longest time to make the habitability solutions go away,' he said. 'It was quite surprising.… We didn't believe it for the longest time.'īecause the findings were such a surprise, the team did rigorous followup models.The results also suggested the atmospheric pressure would be amenable to life as would the 'room-like temperature,' Madhusudhan said. And I do this for a living,' said Nikku Madhusudhan, lead author of the new paper and an astronomer with the University of Cambridge's Institute of Astronomy in the United Kingdom. 'Until the very end, even I didn't know this was possible - that you could have liquid water on this planet. It's the third scenario that surprised the researchers: it showed such a planet would be potentially habitable.

A water world with a small Earth-like core and almost 90 per cent water with very little helium-hydrogen.

A mini-Neptune with an Earth-like core and more than 54 per cent water with a significant hydrogen-helium atmosphere.

A rocky world with a core that was 94 per cent iron with little water and a thick atmosphere of hydrogen-helium.

They then ran through several different scientific models that could account for their findings. The team of astronomers collected data on the planet's atmosphere, mass and more using the September 2019 findings as well as earlier studies. However, the new study published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, suggests that, under the right conditions, K2-18b could be indeed potentially habitable. Just because there was water vapour didn't mean it was potentially habitable. Though there was some excitement over the announcement, discussion arose as to whether or not K2-18b was indeed potentially habitable, with some astronomers arguing that conditions on the planet - such as its high pressure and temperature - would make this world unsuitable for life. For a star like K2-18b, it orbits around a cooler star. This diagram shows how the habitable zones of larger stars are wider and farther away the hotter the star is.

Neptune class star trek