Back in December of 2009 I noted the discovery of a particular exoplanet that might have water, which would make it a candidate for an ‘Earth-like’ planet and therefore a candidate for having life.

[SciTechStory: Another Earth: Will we even remember the planet GJ1214b?]

I wondered if it’s completely forgettable name would have any meaning later; but I also noted that at some time ‘within the next couple of years or so’ the great Hubble Space Telescope would swing around to that neighborhood of the sky and take another look at GJ1214b. Which it has done. The results of Hubble scope’s WFC3 instrument and the HARPS spectrograph in Chile show that this large exoplanet, about 2.7 times the size of Earth, is a waterworld with a very thick water vapor atmosphere, orbiting its primary star, a red dwarf, every 38 hours at a (very short) distance of 2 million kilometers, with an estimated average surface temperature of around 230 degrees Celsius (450 F). Not very like Earth at all and probably hostile to any kind of life as we know it. This was what the original scientists who discovered GJ1214b expected.

What seems new and fascinating is that as a large water planet, with a high concentration of water not only in its atmosphere but also in the planetary body, there may be forms of water occurring naturally that exist on Earth only in laboratories. For example, the high pressures and temperature might produce ‘hot ice’ or ‘superfluid water.’ It’s likely that the rapidly expanding catalog of exoplanets is going to rack up a number of unusual or ‘impossible’ conditions that will force some re-thinking about planet formation, geology and even physics.