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“Liquid magma is actually quite runny,” said University of Chicago planetary scientist, Edwin Kite, about a new study by University of Chicago and Stanford University researchers suggesting a mechanism where planets could develop atmospheres full of water vapor similar to what makes life on Earth’s surface possible, regulating our climate and sheltering us from damaging cosmic rays.
Magma Oceans Suck Hydrogen Out of the Atmosphere
“So it also turns over vigorously, just like oceans on Earth do,” Kite added. “There’s a good chance these magma oceans are sucking hydrogen out of the atmosphere and reacting to form water. Some of that water escapes to the atmosphere, but much more gets slurped up into the magma. Then, after the nearby star strips away the hydrogen atmosphere, the water gets pulled out into the atmosphere instead in the form of water vapor. Eventually, the planet is left with a water-dominated atmosphere. This stage could persist on some planets
A new study by University of Chicago and Stanford University researchers suggests that hot, rocky exoplanets could not only develop atmospheres full of water vapor, but keep them for long stretches.
“It’s increasingly seeming that the solar system is something of an oddball,” said Gregory Laughlin, a planetary scientist at the University of California, Santa Cruz. “While it’s still too soon to know for sure how odd the solar system is, if it turns out to be a cosmological anomaly, then so might be Earth – and life.”
ESO’s VLT Captures a “Very Young Version of our Own Sun”
“This discovery is a snapshot of an environment that is very similar to our Solar System, but at a much earlier stage of its evolution,” says Alexander Bohn, at Leiden University in the Netherlands, about the image of a young, Sun-like star with multiple planets directly imaged located about 300 light-years away in the Southern constellation of Musca (The Fly) in July of 2020 by the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT). Bohn’s team imaged this system during their search for young, giant planets around stars like our Sun but far younger. The sta
Artist impression of Kelt-9 b, the orange blob orbiting a blue star. | Léa Changeat, Author provided
Until the early 2000s, the only known planets were located in our own neighbourhood, the Solar System. They broadly form two categories: the small rocky planets in the inner Solar System and the cold gaseous planets located in the outer part.
With the discovery of exoplanets, planets orbiting stars other than the Sun, additional classes of planets were discovered and a new picture started to emerge. Our Solar System is by no means typical.
For example, data from the Kepler mission has shown that large, gaseous exoplanets can orbit very close to their star – rather than far away from it, as is the case in our Solar System, causing them to reach temperatures exceeding 1,000K (727 degrees Celsius). These have been dubbed “hot” or “ultra-hot” Jupiters. And while most other exoplanets are smaller, between the size of Neptune and Earth, we do not know muc