Archive link. The NYT links to a journal article, but the link is dead. Make of that what you will.
here's the wild bit: The existence of a liquid water ocean is uncertain. Before the James Webb Space Telescope observations, a supercritical state of the water was believed to be more likely. JWST observations were initially considered to be more consistent with a fluid-gas interface and thus a liquid ocean - trace gases such as hydrocarbons and ammonia can be lost from an atmosphere to an ocean if it exists; their presence may thus imply the absence of an ocean-atmosphere separation. TIL ICE IX is realAt temperatures exceeding the critical point, liquids and gases stop being different phases and there is no longer a separation between an ocean and the atmosphere. It is unclear whether observations imply that a separate liquid ocean exists on K2-18b, and detecting such an ocean is difficult from the outside; its existence cannot be inferred or ruled out solely from the mass and radius of a planet.
