Detecting Oceans on other planets

Cool. [Link]

Imagine if astronomers could tell the difference between Earth-like extrasolar planets just by seeing the reflected light from their oceans? That sounds like science fiction, but a team of researchers have proposed that it's really possible to detect the shape of the light curve glinting off an extrasolar planet and know if it has oceans.

This ground-breaking (water splashing?) idea was written in a recent journal article by D.M. Williams and E. Gaidos, entitled Detecting the Glint of Starlight on the Oceans of Distant Planets published January, 2008 in the Arxiv prepress e-Print archive.

Most sci-fi that has dealt with discovery of new worlds has generally had no real idea what was in the target solar system unless a physical probe has gone there first. With this and other techniques along with future telescopes with much higher resolving power, we'll see the destination in some detail long before we ever go there.