The exoplanet has a water-rich envelope, a gas-rich envelope, or a mixture of both.
published by a team of researchers has discovered a mini-Neptune exoplanet - HD 207496b - orbiting around a young, bright K dwarf called HD-207496.The study found that HD 207496b has a density lower than Earth, indicating that it’s not entirely rocky and the celestial body could have a significant amount of water or gas, or both, in its composition.
To find whether the exoplanet contains gas or water , the researchers explored the possible internal structure of HD 207496b assuming the possibilities of these two different compositions. One with a core and H/He envelope, meaning it could be a gaseous planet. And the second, whose atmosphere would have evaporated, is composed of a core, mantle, and a water layer, meaning an ocean planet.
Evaporation modeling revealed that if the exoplanet has a gas-rich atmosphere of hydrogen and helium, that state is temporary: Its star will strip the exoplanet completely within 520 million years. It's also possible that the atmosphere has already gone, and HD 207496b is already a bare-ocean world.The study concluded that further observations of HD 207496b would allow researchers to distinguish between these two hypotheses.
The researchers obtained observations from High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher on the European Southern Observatory's 3.6-meter telescope at La Silla Observatory in Chile and high-resolution imaging, which they combined with the Transit Exoplanet Survey Satellite at the NASA Ames Research Center in California, United States.that could be water worlds - meaning a significant fraction of their mass is composed of water.
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