Water vapor found in K2-18 b exoplanet.

Super-earth, possibly tidally-locked around a red dwarf. Not optimal at all; probably not even habitable. But I’ll take it!

The newest exciting find involves K2-18 b, a planet about 110 light-years from Earth that NASA’s Kepler space telescope discovered in 2015. 

K2-18 b lies in its parent star’s “habitable zone,” the range of distances that could support the existence of liquid water on a world’s surface. Two teams of scientists announced this week that they’ve found water vapor in this world’s air — a big milestone in the search for alien life.

It’s proof of concept, you see. We know that planets can have water vapor, obviously: ours does. So if we can figure out how often that happens, we can start working out better guesses about how likely it’ll be that we can find planets that we CAN live on.

And then we can maybe hope to figure out just where the Hell is everybody.