source
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/09/water-discovered-in-a-small-warm-exoplanets-atmosphere-for-first-time/
The author of the text informs us that an international team of scientists has detected water vapor in the atmosphere of an exoplanet four times bigger than Earth, with a mass 26 times that of our planet and is in the constellation Cygnus, a about 124 light years. It is the smallest planet on which scientists have described the chemical components of its atmosphere.
This discovery was led by a university professor (University of Maryland) and a group of astronomers, experts on exoplanets, and was published in the journal "Nature".
The planet is called HAT-P11b (comes from the acronym of Automatic Telescope Network Hungarians HAT) and astronomers have been able to detect water vapor thanks to observations from three different telescopes of NASA, and the method of transmission spectroscopy, which studies a peculiarity of the light when a planet passes in front of its star. They saw that the material of the atmosphere of the exoplanet absorbs some of the light from its star and it makes that the world seems bigger. The chemical elements in the atmosphere may leave a 'footprint' on light that detect telescopes . With these prints can infer the composition of the atmosphere.
It also informs us that the exoplanet temperature is quite high, but this planet, which probably has a rocky core, has the atmosphere composed mostly of hydrogen and, even without clouds, there are marks of water vapor, a prior factor to life but not sufficient.
Finally the author concludes that this find of water vapor and hydrogen in the atmosphere of exoplanet HAT-P 11b is not only a great job, but it also suggests that astronomers' ideas about how planets are formed and the theory of the core accretion, seem to be true for other planetary systems as well as for ours.
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