According to Digital Trends, astronomers say an exoplanet should be a rocky planet that lies in the habitable zone.
That’s the area of distance from a star at which water can exist on a planet’s surface as liquid. But a new study suggests that even frozen, icy planets could be theoretically capable of supporting life.
Canadian researchers looked at Earth-sized “snowball planets,” which have oceans that are frozen all the way to their equators.
A particularly important variable was the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, as carbon dioxide warms the surface of a planet. You have these planets that traditionally you might consider not habitable and this suggests that maybe they can be.
