'THE HYCEAN PLANETS' | Search for extraterrestrial life: water worlds much more promising.

Instead of focusing on exoplanets that are as Earth-like as possible in the search for extraterrestrial life, research should focus on a completely different class of planets. Two astronomers and an astronomer from Cambridge University are advocating this and justifying this in a specialist article. Among the exoplanets that have already been found, the water worlds they prefer with hydrogen-rich atmospheres are much more numerous and easier to observe than Earth-like exoplanets, they have determined. As a name for the class, they suggest “hycean planets”, a mixture of the English terms for hydrogen (“hydrogen”) and (“ocean”) – perhaps “hycean planets”.