Planets With Water

Watery Planets

–By Christine Pulliam

In our solar system, only one planet is blessed with an ocean: Earth. Our home world is a rare, blue jewel compared to the deserts of Mercury, Venus and Mars. But what if our Sun had not one but two habitable ocean worlds?

Astronomers have found such a planetary system orbiting the star Kepler-62. This five-planet system has two worlds in the habitable zone – the distance from their star at which they receive enough light and warmth for liquid water to theoretically exist on their surfaces. Modeling by researchers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics suggests that both planets are water worlds, their surfaces completely covered by a global ocean with no land in sight.

“These planets are unlike anything in our solar system. They have endless oceans,” said lead author Lisa Kaltenegger of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. “There may be life there, but could it be technology-based like ours? Life on these worlds would be under water with no easy access to metals, to electricity, or fire for metallurgy. Nonetheless, these worlds will still be beautiful blue planets circling an orange star – and maybe life’s inventiveness to get to a technology stage will surprise us.”


I selected this article not only because in caught my attention but because of its information and Technologic advancement in the history of earth.If they have found a planet with water like ours the possibility of finding a new home when  earth is no longer capable of living in have increased. But by what time could our technology be superior enough to travel to the next possible star to find our next possible planet. Just imagine the possibility to live somewhere els to have a back up plan if earth is out of our reach for saving, if something goes wrong we could just pack up our things and go but we have to keep looking for our plan b this new finding has just increased our chance for looking deeper.