Rain Droplets Helps Identify the Potentially Habitable Planets

The scientists have exhausted their efforts to find out the prevalence of another Habitable Planet similar to Earth. While doing so they unveiled a scope of similarity on one of the habitable planets, which had familiar rain Droplets. In a recent research paper, Harvard researchers found that droplets are remarkably similar across different planetary environments. Even similarities could be found out in the most contrasting planets of the solar system, Jupiter and Earth.

“The lifecycle of clouds is really important when we think about planet habitability,” said Kaitlyn Loftus, a graduate student in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences and lead author of the paper. Clouds and rain droplets are two complex models and it becomes difficult to trace out the evolution.Scientists across the world are looking to find a coherent way to understand how clouds evolve, and the first step is whether the cloud Droplets evaporate in the atmosphere or make it to the surface as rain.

Climate modelers say that the significant aspect of raindrop behavior is whether or not the rain Droplets make it to the surface of the earth because the water is key for templating climatic changes. Along with the gravitational movement, the size of the droplets also matters. Too big and the drop will break apart due to insufficient surface tension, regardless of whether it’s water, methane, or superheated, liquid iron as on an exoplanet called WASP-76b.

While many of us might have examined the tethering shape of the droplets, raindrops are actually spherical when small. They become heavily squashed when they grow larger. By taking all those properties into account, two scientists Loftus and Wordsworth found that across a wide range of planetary conditions, only a small fraction of Droplets of the possible drop size in a cloud could reach the surface.