Waterworld

NASA, ESA, and D. Agular (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics)

     Our universe is a place that is still very strange to us. There are still many undiscovered stars or planets and tons of unknown that are still hidden to us. At time, new discovery would create a spark in the astronomy community. Recently, scientists have discovered a new type of alien planet. It is a steamy waterworld that is larger than Earth but smaller than Uranus.
     Astronomers discovered planet GJ 1214b in December 2009,  it stands on it own class called exoplanet. It  is considered a watery world because observations by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope suggest that it's enshrouded by a thick, steamy atmosphere. GJ 1214b is located 40 light years from Earth in the constellation Ophiuchus. " GJ 1214b is like no planet we know of, a huge fraction of its mass is made of water." Berta said, a leading astronomer from an international team of astronomers of the Harvard-Smith-sonian Center for Astrophysics. GJ 1214b is also known as the super-Earth, it is about 2.7 times Earth's diameter and weighs almost seven times as much. the super-Earth orbits a red dwarf star every 38 hours at a distance of 2 million kilometers, and its estimated temperature of 230 degrees Celsius.
     There are many observations and predictions that Gj 1214b is composed mainly of water, it can be explained by the presence of a planet-enshrouding haze in its atmosphere. They used Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3 (WDC3) to study GJ 1214b. Astronomers calculated its density, it is only about 2 grams per cubic centimeter. Water has a density of 1 gram per cubic centimeter, while Earth's average density is 5.5 grams per cubic centimeter. We can see that GJ 1214b has much more water that Earth does, and much less rock.
     "The high temperatures and high pressures would form exotic materials like "hot ice" or "superfluid water". substances that are completely alien to our everyday experience," Berta said.


http://news.yahoo.com/type-alien-planet-steamy-waterworld-162802250.html