A planet that looks like a single unblinking eye, half-frozen and half-melted, quietly circling a faint red star. Another, still glowing from its own birth, is carving rings into a vast disk of dust and gas around a young Sun-like star. These are not scenes from a movie, but real worlds that NASA and other observatories have begun to resolve with startling clarity. Together, they raise a question that is both scientific and spiritual: if the universe keeps producing worlds with the right ingredients for oceans, atmospheres, and long stretches of time, what does that say about life’s place in the cosmos? The answer is more nuanced than the headlines suggest, and it invites us to look outward at these distant planets while also looking inward at how we understand consciousness, creation, and our role in a universe that appears to be experimenting with life-friendly conditions again and again.

Meeting the “Eyeball” Planet

LHS 1140b, sometimes described as an “eyeball planet,” is a real world about 50 light-years away in the constellation Cetus. It orbits a cool red dwarf star and is roughly 1.7 times Earth’s width and 5.6 times its mass. What makes it unsettling isn’t horror-movie imagery. It’s the physics.

LHS 1140b is probably tidally locked, meaning one side always faces its star while the other sits in endless night. Current models suggest most of the planet may be encased in ice, with a circular region on the star-facing side warmed just enough to melt. From space, that would resemble a single dark “eye” of liquid ocean surrounded by a frozen shell.

Crucially, this planet sits in the habitable zone of its small star. If the star were Sun-like, such a close orbit would boil any ocean away. Because it’s a cooler red dwarf, the dayside may hover around 20°C (68°F), a comfortable range for liquid water.

Using the James Webb Space Telescope’s Near-Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph, scientists examined starlight filtering through the planet’s atmosphere during transit and found hints it may be less dense than rock and possibly wrapped in nitrogen-rich air.

Astrophysicist Charles Cadieux called LHS 1140b “our best bet to one day indirectly confirm liquid water on the surface of an alien world beyond our Solar System.” For now, it is a frozen eye fixed on its star—part laboratory, part mirror for our own questions about life.

How Strange Worlds Are Born

To understand a planet like LHS 1140b, it helps to start at the cradle of planets: the protoplanetary disk.

Young stars are often wrapped in vast disks of gas and dust, the leftover material from their own birth. Within these disks, tiny particles collide, stick together, and slowly grow into planet embryos. For years, astronomers suspected that the rings and gaps seen in some disks were sculpted by these forming planets, but direct confirmation was rare.

WISPIT 2b has changed that. This infant gas giant, about five times the mass of Jupiter and only around 5 million years old, orbits a Sun-like star called WISPIT 2. Using the Very Large Telescope’s SPHERE instrument in Chile, researchers imaged a bright, multi-ringed disk surrounding the star and, inside one of its gaps, a glowing point of light: the forming planet itself, still radiating in infrared.

Observations from the Magellan telescope picked up hydrogen gas falling onto WISPIT 2b, strong evidence that it is still accreting material and building its atmosphere. Lead author Richelle van Capelleveen described the system as one that “will likely be a benchmark for years to come.”

By watching WISPIT 2b grow inside its disk, scientists gain a clearer picture of how planetary systems emerge, from gas giants to smaller, potentially habitable worlds.

Scientists Define a Life-Friendly World

When scientists say LHS 1140b “could contain life,” they are not imagining forests or cities. They are asking a quieter, more basic question: can this world support liquid water and a stable atmosphere for long periods of time.

The new James Webb observations suggest that LHS 1140b is not a rocky super-Earth or a gas covered mini-Neptune. Its low density and likely icy composition point to a world covered in frozen water, with a central region of liquid ocean on the star-facing side. Models indicate that this area may sit around 20°C, which is comfortably in the range where water can stay liquid at the surface.

There are also early hints of a nitrogen rich atmosphere, identified by looking at how the planet’s atmosphere absorbs starlight in specific infrared wavelengths. On Earth, nitrogen is the main background gas in our air and provides a stable framework for climate and surface pressure. Co author René Doyon noted that detecting an Earth like atmosphere on a temperate exoplanet is “pushing Webb’s capabilities to its limits” and that more years of data are needed to confirm nitrogen and search for carbon dioxide.

Even if those detections are confirmed, “habitable” does not mean “inhabited.” It means the basic physical and chemical conditions for life as we know it may be present. In scientific terms, that possibility alone is extraordinary. It turns a distant icy sphere into a serious candidate in the search for living worlds.

Linking Planet Birth to Planetary Habitability

LHS 1140b and WISPIT 2b sit at very different stages of planetary life, yet together they fill in key gaps in our understanding of how habitable worlds might emerge.

WISPIT 2b shows a young system still in motion. A massive gas giant is actively carving a gap in a wide, multi ringed disk, while hydrogen falls onto the planet and feeds its growth. This supports a long standing idea that planets shape their birth environments by clearing paths and rearranging dust and gas. It gives astronomers a living example of how structure in a disk can signal the presence of hidden worlds.

LHS 1140b represents a later chapter. It is cooler, heavier, and far more stable, with signs of ice, a potential liquid ocean region, and hints of a nitrogen rich atmosphere. It helps scientists test how planets around red dwarfs might hold on to air and water. That question is crucial, because red dwarfs are the most common stars in our galaxy.

Together, these two worlds connect formation to potential habitability. One shows how planets are born. The other asks whether some of them might eventually host environments where life could take hold.

Inner Worlds, Outer World

Looking at LHS 1140b or WISPIT 2b, we are not just cataloguing distant objects. We are watching the universe explore the conditions for consciousness, molecule by molecule, orbit by orbit.

In one system, a young gas giant feeds on dust and gas, shaping its birth environment. In another, a frozen world may hold a warm eye of liquid water, stable enough to matter for life. Neither of these scenes is about us, yet they quietly reframe us. If planets like this are common, then the universe is not indifferent to the ingredients of life. It keeps setting the stage.

This is where science and spirituality touch. Astronomy refuses to center human beings, yet it also shows that the patterns that birthed us are not unique to our address in space. As Carl Sagan wrote, “We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.” When we study distant planets, the cosmos is, in a sense, studying its own potential.

We live on one world, but not in isolation from the rest of existence. Each newly imaged disk, each possible ocean world, invites a simple, contemplative question: what does it mean to be a conscious part of a universe that is still learning how to host life?

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