In 2016, astronomers using data from NASA’s Kepler mission, discovered a planet unlike anything in our solar system –a “water world” planetary system orbiting the star Kepler-62 –a five-planet system with two worlds in the habitable zone their surfaces completely covered by an endless global ocean with no land or mountains in sight.
“Utterly Different Worlds Than Earth”
“These are utterly different worlds compared to our own Earth,” said Harvard University astronomer Li Zeng in 2019 about the chances that water worlds are a common feature of the Milky Way, which was heightened by research using computer simulations showing that sub-Neptune-sized planets –planets featuring radii about two to four times that of Earth– are likely to be water worlds. Some of these planets, Zeng observed, have oceans deep enough to exert pressures equivalent to a million times our atmospheric surface pressure. Under those conditions, fluid water gets compressed into high-pres