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“There’s some evidence of super-Earths with thick atmospheres and some with thin or no atmospheres at all,” but observations point to many of these worlds being “really cloudy and hazy,” she says. One common example is super-Earths, worlds that are larger than Earth but smaller than Neptune.Īllison Youngblood, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, has been using the Hubble Space Telescope to study super-Earths orbiting near red dwarfs. This dark blue central ocean surrounded by sea ice gives the appearance of an eyeball.Īs astronomers racked up exoplanet discoveries over the last 30 years, they realized eyeball planets may be plentiful among planetary systems and that a wide range of worlds may take on an eyeball form.
![keeplar photox keeplar photox](https://pi.movoto.com/p/402/20142146_0_7FIyBZ_p.jpeg)
This means that we always see the same face of our Moon.Įyeball planets initially got their moniker when astronomers noted that in the habitable zone, tidally locked worlds covered by water would become frozen starting at the terminator (the edge of night) while the seas would remain clear near the substellar point (the point that directly faces the star). We have a good example of such synchronous rotation on our own cosmic front porch: The Moon orbits Earth once a month and takes the same amount of time to turn once on its axis. But over time, the host star’s gravity pulls at the world, slowing the body’s rotation until it becomes tidally locked. These characteristics may make eyeball planets within the Goldilocks zone prime candidates for hosting life, but they could also make otherwise habitable planets inhospitable.Īfter coalescing around its star, a planet has some spin. Their arrangement of an always-lit and always-dark side causes fascinating weather and unusual surface conditions. Scientists are beginning to realize that eyeball worlds are more than just curiosities - they’re key to understanding how common life might be in the universe. These worlds orbit so near to their suns that they are tidally locked, with one hemisphere always facing toward the star and the opposite one in eternal night. And most of Kepler’s finds are worlds circling close to red dwarf suns, some of which are similar in size to our own.Īmong these Earth-like exoplanets, there exists a bizarre class known as eyeball planets. During its nine-year mission, the planet-hunting Kepler space telescope found 2,709 planets through this transit method another 2,057 are still awaiting confirmation. That proximity makes it much easier to spot any planets that pass in front of the tiny star, as such eclipses tend to block a large fraction of starlight and make the presence of an exoplanet clear. Thus, the habitable zone is quite close to these stars. At a mere 0.08 to 0.5 times the mass of the Sun, these stars only reach surface temperatures around 4,000 to 6,700 degrees Fahrenheit (2,200 to 3,700 degrees Celsius).
![keeplar photox keeplar photox](https://p1-ssl.vatera.hu/photos/54/07/lars-kepler-a-tuz-tanuja-skandinav-krimi-66eb_1_big.jpg)
Take red dwarfs, for example: Of the hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy, astronomers estimate that about 80 percent of them are red dwarfs. The hotter the star, the farther away its habitable zone sits.
![keeplar photox keeplar photox](https://i.pinimg.com/736x/46/bd/f8/46bdf863a4e070657a9b795b77354afc--canon-lenses.jpg)
The habitable zone, or Goldilocks zone, is the region surrounding a star where water can exist on the surface of an orbiting planet or moon. But so far, searches have turned up empty, leading scientists to use some out-of-the-box thinking to find another haven for life in the universe. And as we entered a golden age of exoplanet discovery, the hunt picked up for Earth 2.0, a twin to our planet orbiting within its star’s habitable zone. Humans have long imagined what life on another world may look like.
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