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A joint international research team from several universities has unveiled the first of its kind for a new exoplanet with two important characteristics: its occurrence within the habitable range and the presence of water vapor on its surface.

The results, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, say that the new planet K2-18b orbits a star known as the red dwarfs, stars with low surface temperature, less than half the temperature of the sun's surface, as well as small So big that if one was the size of a table tennis ball, the sun would be the size of a football.

However, the new planet is so close to the star that it receives an appropriate temperature, enabling it to retain Earth-like temperature in its atmosphere, allowing water on its surface to exist in liquid form. If the planet were close to the star and the water would have completely evaporated, if it had been far away from it, it would have been called a "life-span".

To find these results, the team used observational results for this red dwarf, called "K2-18", which is 111 light-years away from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope in 2016 and 2017.

In addition, the team developed open-source algorithms to analyze light from the red dwarf as it passed through the planet's atmosphere. The results revealed water vapor, with reference to hydrogen and helium in the planet's atmosphere, K2-18b.

Looking for life
According to the new study, other important compounds may exist in the planet's atmosphere, such as nitrogen and methane, but they are still undetectable by current techniques, so more studies are needed to examine the planet and its red dwarf.

This new discovery does not mean that there is life on the planet K2-18b. And indicate the existence of life.

Red dwarfs are smaller in size than the sun so that one would look like a tennis ball if the sun was the size of a football (websites)

The new revelation is also a golden opportunity to answer an important old question that has been circulating in the corridors of many research centers for decades: Is the Earth unique?

Researchers believe this is not the case, and with the launch of NASA's James Webb telescope next year and the launch of his comrade Ariel in 2028, it will be easier to examine more planets and red dwarfs to determine the proportion and composition of potentially viable planets. To 40 billion planets.