Located 50 light-years from Earth, the beady-eyed exoplanet LHS 1140 b could be a perfect candidate for discovering liquid water outside the solar sys

'Eyeball' planet spied by James Webb telescope might be habitable

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2024-07-10 05:30:04

Located 50 light-years from Earth, the beady-eyed exoplanet LHS 1140 b could be a perfect candidate for discovering liquid water outside the solar system, new research suggests.

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has found that a distant world discovered several years ago could be an "eyeball" planet with an iris-like ocean surrounded by a sea of solid ice — making it a candidate for a potentially habitable world.

The exoplanet, called LHS-1140b, was first discovered in 2017. Initially, it was thought to be a "mini-Neptune" swirling with a dense mixture of water, methane and ammonia. But the new findings, accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal Letters and available on the preprint server arXiv, suggest that the planet is icier and wetter than scientists thought. That means it could support life.

"Of all currently known temperate exoplanets, LHS-1140b could well be our best bet to one day indirectly confirm liquid water on the surface of an alien world beyond our Solar System," first author Charles Cadieux, an astrophysicist at the University of Montreal, said in a statement. "This would be a major milestone in the search for potentially habitable exoplanets."