Scientists have found a new class of potentially habitable planets. They don't look like Earth

Researchers from the Cambridge Institute of Astronomy, led by Dr Nikku Madhusudhan, have suggested,

that life can be sought not only on Earth-like planets, but also on hot, ocean-like planets with hydrogen-rich atmospheres.

The new study took K2-18b as a sample -It is an exoplanet orbiting the red dwarf K2-18, about 111 light-years from Earth: it orbits a star in 33 days and contains water in its atmosphere.

There are many more planets of this type than similar ones.to the ground. Previously, scientists attributed them to super-Earths or mini-Neptuns, depending on their density. Most minineptuns are about 1.6 times larger than Earth. Most of the scientific community believes that such planets are too large to have rocky depths, and the temperature under their atmosphere is too high to support life.

The researchers conducted an analysis of the conditions on such planets depending on thetheir position and the properties of their parent star, and came to the conclusion that they could bebe microbial life similar to that found in Earth's most extreme aquatic environments.It was proposed to give this class of planets the name Hycean.

Hycean planets discover brand newopportunities to find life elsewhere. Previously, when we were looking for various molecular signatures, we focused on planets like Earth, which was a smart start. But we think the Hycean planets offer a better chance of finding traces of life.

Nikku Madhusudhan, author of the study 

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