HUBBLE DETECTED WATER IN FIVE EXOPLANETS

These are great news for astronomers and particularly astrophysicists.

Using the Space Telescope Hubble, to teams of scientists from NASA and the University of Maryland were capable to detect the presence of water in five exoplanets.

Those are WASP-17b, HD209458b, WASP-12b, WASP-19b and XO-1b. The signals receive are not all equal. The stronger signals indicating the presence of water has been detected on.

 "We're very confident that we see a water signature for multiple planets," said Avi Mandell, a planetary scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., and lead author of an Astrophysical Journal paper, published this week describing the findings for WASP-12b, WASP-17b and WASP-19b.

"This work really opens the door for comparing how much water is present in atmospheres on different kinds of exoplanets, for example hotter versus cooler ones."

The studies were part of a census of exoplanet atmospheres led by L. Drake Deming of the University of Maryland in College Park. Both teams used Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3 to explore the details of absorption of light through the planets' atmospheres.

Based on an article published by SPACE TODAY