Could This Super-Earth Actually Be Habitable?

It’s a first in humanities search for other, habitable planets.

Transcript

00:00When looking for habitable planets, there are a couple of things necessary for life

00:07to survive there.

00:08Things like atmosphere, ideally with oxygen, it has to be in a certain range of a heat

00:11providing star, and it needs water.

00:14And for the first time ever, astronomers think they've finally found a super-Earth exoplanet

00:18that has all three.

00:19Angelo Siaris, an astronomer and lead author of the report, said in a press conference,

00:23�This is the only planet right now that we know outside the solar system that has

00:26the correct temperature to support water.

00:28It has an atmosphere, and it has water in it, making this planet the best candidate

00:32for habitability that we know right now.�

00:34They're calling it K2-18b, and it's 110 light years away, tucked in the Leo constellation.

00:40It orbits a red dwarf star that's about a third our sun's mass, meaning it has shorter

00:44years, orbiting in just 33 days.

00:46But K2-18b is big, roughly eight times the size of Earth, and made of similar compounds

00:52as the Moon and Mars, which astronomers say, because of the detection of water, could mean

00:56an ocean covers its entire planetary surface.