Scientists working with the Hubble space telescope have discovered what until recently only Kevin Costner thought possible – a waterworld. The distant planet, at only 40 light years away one of the closer planets in the galaxy, “is like no planet we know of,” said astronomer Zachory Berta, the lead researcher in analying data from the Hubble telescope. “A huge fraction of its mass is made up of water.”
The waterworld, known officially – but not poetically – as GJ1214b, is a strange comparison to our own planet, which is made up predominantly, but not exclusively, of water. GJ1214b is made up entirely of water, but the average atmospheric temperature is 200 degrees celsius – a temperature in our own atmosphere at which water would boil twice over. GJ1214b is also 2.7 times larger than the Earth, yet it has a mass almost 7 times greater. This means, ccording to Berta, “that the gravitational forces at play on the water are like nothing on Earth. This, paired with the extreme temperatures, mean that the planet sees some fairly bizarre phenomenon.”
Bizarre, up to and including “superfluid water” and “hot ice” brought about by extremes in pressure and temperature which are “completely alien to our everyday experience.”
This is likely why Twitter was abuzz last week with applogies to Kevin Costner – aside from a supposedly moving eulogy at Whitney Huston’s funeral, he was right all along.
Andrew Reeves writes the Morning Cable (and other stuff) for Toronto Standard.
