Planets don’t necessarily need to be like Earth to host life. They can have different atmospheres, different sizes, orbit different types of stars — as long as all of these work together to create the right conditions for life, it doesn’t really have to be Earth-like. An example of this is planets with atmospheres dominated by hydrogen and helium (ours is dominated by nitrogen and oxygen). According to a new study, rocky exoplanets with this type of atmosphere can sustain liquid water (and quite possibly, life) for billions of years.
Artistic depiction of a super-Earth. Image credits: ESO/M. Kornmesser.
Astronomers have been looking at our solar system, then at the rest of our galaxy, then at our solar system again — our solar system is not standard at all.
First, researchers noticed that a…