A new technique could help determine how much water is locked up in minerals beneath an exoplanet's surface.
"We wanted to investigate whether these planets, after such a tumultuous upbringing, could rehabilitate themselves and go on to host surface water," Claire Guimond, lead author of the new study and a doctoral student in Cambridge's Department of Earth Sciences, said in aGuimond and her team demonstrated that interior water could replenish water at the surface of a planet once the world's host star had matured and cooled.
"The model gives us an upper limit on how much water a planet could carry at depth, based on these minerals and their ability to take water into their structure," she continued. The team found that a planet's size is integral to how much water it can store, because this determines the amount of water-rich minerals that can dwell beneath its surface. This doesn't necessarily mean that larger planets have larger water reserves, though. have drier rocky mantles.
The temperature and pressure in the upper mantle are ideal for creating green-blue minerals called wadsleyite and ringwoodite, both of which can soak up water. This layer of rock is also situated within the reach of , meaning water can be carried to the surface by volcanic activity, hitting the atmosphere as steam. The process could also carry other ingredients vital for life from the planet's interior to its surface, researchers said.
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