Like the movie Waterworld, astronomers find a planet containing only water

JAKARTA – Astronomer finds a planet similar to earth’s condition in the 1995 post-apocalyptic film Waterworld Alerts. In the film, it is said that the Earth’s polar ice caps have completely melted. So much so that the sea level has risen by more than 8 kilometres, covering almost all of the mainland.

Well, this pair of planets discovered by astronomers is truly unique. Because both are made up of vast oceans. Its depth is 500 times deeper than the average depth of the Earth’s oceans.

The planet is Kepler-138 yielded , located 218 light-years away in the constellation Lyra. Discovered in 2014 by NASA’s Kepler Space Observatory and followed up by observations by the Spitzer and Hubble Space Telescopes.

However, don’t expect to find fish on these planets. Because besides being too hot, the pressure is also very high. So there is no clear boundary between sea level and the planet.

Caroline Piaulet of the University of Montreal’s Trottier Institute for Research on Exoplanets (iREx) said that Kepler-138c and Kepler-138d are nearly the same size, with low densities. So she concludes that most of it is made up of water.

The two planets orbit a red dwarf star, which is twice the mass of Earth but about half the density of Earth. Because you don’t have much rock solid.

“Kepler-138 b is one of the smallest exoplanets, with the mass of the planet Mars,” Piaulet said.

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“Kepler-138 and cd have very different properties and most of their entire volume is probably made up of water. This is the best proof that there really is a planet made up of water. This long-standing theory is proven,” added Björn Benneke, study co-author and professor of astrophysics at the University of Montreal.

Although there is water, there is not always life. This is because the temperature in Kepler-138d’s atmosphere is most likely higher than the boiling point of water. “We expect a thick atmosphere made of vapor on this planet. Only in a vapor atmosphere that has the potential to become water under high pressure, or even water in another phase that occurs under high pressure, which is called supercritical fluid,” Piaulet added.

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