Water found on potentially habitable planet

In a first, NASA`s Hubble Space Telescope has detected water vapor signatures in the atmosphere of a distant planet called K2-18b, an exoplanet around a small red dwarf star about 110 light years away in the constellation Leo.

An exoplanet refers to a planet beyond our solar system.

Astronomers at the Centre for Space Exochemistry Data at the University College London used data from NASA`s Hubble Space Telescope to make the discovery.

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If confirmed by further studies, this will be the only exoplanet known to have both water in its atmosphere and temperatures that could sustain liquid water on a rocky surface.

Liquid water would only be possible if the planet turns out to be terrestrial in nature, rather than resembling a small version of Neptune.

Given the high level of activity of its red dwarf star, K2-18b may be more hostile to life as we know it than Earth, as it is likely to be exposed to more high-energy radiation.

The planet, discovered by NASA`s Kepler Space Telescope in 2015, also has a mass eight times greater than Earth`s. That means the surface gravity on this planet would be significantly higher than on our planet.

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The team used archive data from 2016 and 2017 captured by Hubble and developed open-source algorithms to analyze the host star`s light filtered through K2-18b`s atmosphere.

The results revealed the molecular signature of water vapour, and also suggest the presence of hydrogen and helium in the planet`s atmosphere.

The authors of the paper, published in the journal Nature Astronomy, believe that other molecules, including nitrogen and methane, may be present but they remain undetectable with current observations.