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One-third of known planets may be enormous ocean worlds

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tankdrop24

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Full article here.

Water is a key ingredient for life — and new research suggests we might find it all over the galaxy.

Scientists looked at the mass of super-Earths, a kind of planet common across the cosmos but not present in our own solar system. These rocky worlds are several times larger than Earth, but the team's analysis of known super-Earths reveals something astounding: Many of them may be literal water worlds.
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Pretty crazy to think about the kind of worlds that could be out there.
 
I recall reading some years ago that a problem with water worlds supporting life is if they have oceans that are hundreds or more miles deep, there's a huge separation between the energy source of the surface sunlight, and the nutrients found in the sea bed. So life may well never be able to get far because the water at the surface is pretty much pure water with nothing for a plant to grow on, while except for the occasional vent the sea bed has no energy.

Also, this makes the "aliens are invading to steal our water" bad sci-fi plot even dumber than we already knew it was.
 
Avernus said:
I recall reading some years ago that a problem with water worlds supporting life is if they have oceans that are hundreds or more miles deep, there's a huge separation between the energy source of the surface sunlight, and the nutrients found in the sea bed.
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Or even worse, oceans deep enough that the ocean floor is just high-pressure ice.
 
McBobbish said:
Well, Earth was completely ocean at one point right?
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Not as far as I'm aware. Granted, the oceanic percentage goes up the farther back in time, and perhaps near the beginning it hit 95% plus before there were solid granite cratons to build continents with, but no, at no point that we are aware of was Earth ever fully a water world.
 
Richardson said:
Not as far as I'm aware. Granted, the oceanic percentage goes up the farther back in time, and perhaps near the beginning it hit 95% plus before there were solid granite cratons to build continents with, but no, at no point that we are aware of was Earth ever fully a water world.
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There is a possibility that earth was covered in water before the moon forming impact. The error bars on that are large though thanks to ,you know, that entire planet slamming into earth making the historical record a tiny bit mixed up.
 
How would different gravity affect water pressure on extraterrestrial oceans ? For example on Earth every 10 meter of depth equals an additional 100 kPa of pressure.
 
Given that it may be possible for life to exist on Jupiter I am actually not all that surprised by this.
 
galahad said:
How would different gravity affect water pressure on extraterrestrial oceans ? For example on Earth every 10 meter of depth equals an additional 100 kPa of pressure.
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P = ρgh (density of fluid * gravitational field strength * height of fluid above) under constant g; I'd imagine that would generalise to ∫ρgdh for varying ρ and g.


Edit: to clarify, I meant varying g to mean changes to g due to large variations in depth/altitude
 
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