New Host For Life? HAT-P-11b May Just be The Smallest Exoplanet to Host Alien Life
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Searching the night skies in hopes of finding an Earth-like planet amongst distant stars for signs of life, one team of researchers has found the atmospheric water vapor they've been looking for on a Neptune-sized planet only 122 light-years away.
Publishing their results in this week's issue of the journal Nature, the international team of astronomers are the first to identify water on a planet so small, and were able to clearly identify the vapor through a collaborative effort between the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, the Spitzer Space Telescope, and the Kepler Space Telescope. The planet, known simply as HAT-P-11b lies in the distant Cygnus constellation, and is nearly 5 times larger than Earth.
"It's a fantastic observation" astronomer at Lehigh University, Knicole Colon says. "It opens up a whole new regime in our attempt to understand how exoplanets form and what they're made of."
Though the necessary water vapor is an Earth-like discovery for the record books, HAT-P-11b is far from an exact replica of our planetary home. Only 5 million miles away from its parent star, versus the Earth's 93 million mile distance from the sun, the planet's surface temperature is above 1,100oF and its year is less than five days long.
While the researchers are mainly looking to perfect their observational techniques to better identify Earthlike planets in nearby solar systems, the concept of life on HAT-P-11b cannot entirely be ruled out by the simple sauna-like atmosphere of the planet. As water remains one of the most vital ingredients known for the creation of life, even in the absence of oxygen as it is found in some regions of the Earth. Though the planet may not be host to mammalian-like life forms or even algae, there is a large possibility that unique organisms such as our archaea thermophiles may be below, on the planet's surface.
"A thermophile is an organism that thrives at relatively high temperatures and many thermophiles are archaea" researchers at Princeton University say. "It has been suggested that thermophilic eubacteria are among the earliest bacteria, and are found in various geothermally heated regions of the Earth."
Researchers say that the possibility of life on the planet is relatively small, though it contains many components for an organism's success, however, are unable to rule out any such possibility as they cannot glimpse at the planet's surface 122 light-years away... not yet anyways.
