Astronomers have often theorized that planets exist in our galaxy that are entirely covered in water, now those theories have at last been confirmed by NASA’s space telescope Hubble.

Observations have confirmed that a large percentage of the mass of the ‘Super-Earth’ exoplanet GJ1214b is made up of water. Water worlds such as this are thought to have formed far from its sun where water in the form of ice is more plentiful. As the planet migrated towards its host star the large amounts of ice would have melted covering the planet in oceans. At some point the planet would have crossed the habitable zone around the star where a temperate climate could have allowed life to form in its warm oceans.

The planet is around 2.7 times larger than Earth and orbits its red dwarf star at a distance of only 1.3 million miles (2 million km). At such a close distance the planet heats up to around 450F (232C), which although much hotter than Earth is only half as warm as Venus. These warm temperatures make GJ1214b a very steamy planet indeed, it's extremely dense atmosphere is almost entirely composed of water vapor.

The discovery was made by a team at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, a spokesman said “GJ1214b is like no planet we know of, the high temperatures and high pressures would form exotic materials like 'hot ice' or 'superfluid water,' substances that are completely alien to our everyday experience."

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