Salty Oceans Could Make More Worlds Habitable

Space





Photo credit:

Artist's impression of a water-filled moon orbiting an exoplanet. Lusianomendez/CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia

In the quest to identify the conditions that make planets habitable, the influence of the oceans has been neglected. An effort to change this has found that curious things happen on a planet with very salty, or very fresh, seas. Either circumstance might keep a planet suitable for life, even it is exposed to such little light that previous models might have written it off as an ice world.