Neptune-sized planet with water? All you want to know about this new planet

As space scientists go deep in the space exploration, there is something new and interesting that comes their way. Recently, scientists have discovered a distant planet with a strong water signature. The Neptune-sized planet has been discovered using the NASA's Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes. The observation will be of great help in understand more about the birth and development of planetary systems. The research was published in the journal Science.

More about the discovery:

• The study combined observations from NASA's Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes

• It shows that the distant planet HAT-P-26b has a primitive atmosphere composed almost entirely of hydrogen and helium

• Located about 437 light-years away, HAT-P-26b orbits a star roughly twice as old as our Sun

• It is one of the most detailed study about a planet resembling a 'arm Neptune', or a planet that is Neptune-sized and close to its star

• The researchers determined that HAT-P-26b's atmosphere is relatively clear of clouds and has a strong water signature

• The planet is not a water world but is the best measurement of water to date on an exoplanet of this size

How do they find out the atmospheric composition?

• To study the atmosphere, the researchers use data from transits

• Each transit is a moment in which the planet passed in front of its host star

• During this transit, a fraction of the starlight gets filtered through the planet's atmosphere

• Some of the wavelengths of light is absorbed and some are not

• Researchers can work backward to figure out the chemical composition of the atmosphere by studying the signatures of this change in starlight as a result of this filtering

Experts speaks

Hannah Wakeford, a postdoctoral researcher at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Centre in the US says, "Astronomers have just begun to investigate the atmospheres of these distant Neptune-mass planets, and almost right away, we found an example that goes against the trend in our solar system."

Tiffany Kataria of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in the US said, "To have so much information about a warm Neptune is still rare, so analysing these data sets simultaneously is an achievement in and of itself."

David K Sing of the University of Exeter said, "This analysis shows that there is a lot more diversity in the atmospheres of these exoplanets than we were expecting, which is providing insight into how planets can form and evolve differently than in our solar system."

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