Exoplanets “potentially habitable” are regularly discovered. Often you get dreamed during these announcements and you imagine yourself frolicking in the jungles of Pandora or the deserts of Tatooine. But a new study suggests that if there is a habitable planet, it would look more like Waterworld, the film with Kevin Costner than our good old planet. In reality, the Earth would be quite unique in the universe.
Water is at ease
This is a study conducted by Fergus Simpson, an astronomer at the Barcelona Cosmos Institute, who claims that the living planets in the universe would, as a rule, be ocean planets. It indicates that if there is water on a planet, it covers 90% -minimum- of its surface.
Simpson’s team created a statistical model, based on our planet and our knowledge of the cosmos. Once different simulations have been carried out, they have become a reality: it is almost impossible for a planet with liquid water to resemble our planet.
Indeed, the upstream of water is difficult to control for a star, so much so that the simulated planet most similar to the Earth is covered with 90% of water, against 70% for our planet. The researchers then explain that our Earth is actually based on a fragile balance impossible to reproduce with the simulations. A balance that allowed him to house life as we know it. To make it simple, either a planet is virgin of any liquid water, or it is completely covered.
The Star Wars planet Kamino.
