Super-Earth Is Super Wet, Super Close

It's an astronomical find that was practically taunting us to come and get it: it's only 40 light years away. And it was discovered with the use of a 40 cm telescope, comparatively humble equipment available to the earnest but amateur backyard astronomer.

What "it" is, as CNN explains, is a super-Earth, newly discovered to be, in terms of the vast scale of the known universe, practically next door. The term super-Earth is reserved for planets with greater mass than ours, but not quite as large and massive as those categorized as gas giants (think: Jupiter).

More remarkably, the just-discovered planet has water. Lots of it. In fact, the just now known-to-us world appears to be one giant ocean, so far with no evidence of any continental land masses that meet or rise above the water's surface. Indications are that the planet also exhibits an atmosphere that is several times denser than ours. It is assumed that conditions would be too hot for life to thrive. But the discovery is still cause for excitement in the space sciences community.

Further, the planet which has been given the perhaps not-so-catchy name of GJ 1214b, orbits a star that is significantly smaller than ours, which is itself a below-average sized star. The working hypothesis has been that planets are unlikely to be found orbiting stars with much lower mass (and gravitational pull) than our sun. Accordingly, the find is noteworthy for this reason as well.

David Charbonneau, Harvard astronomer and lead author of the paper published in Nature summarizing the findings, reflects on the impact in a statement quoted by CNN: "The big excitement is that we have found a watery world orbiting a very nearby and very small star."

Charbonneau and a team of astronomers operate the MEarth Project, which relies of an array of small telescopes specifically looking to the smaller nearby stars for signs of exoplanets that may contain water.

Image courtesy of NASA, via Wikimedia Commons