Don’t get too excited yet about your passionate search for extraterrestrial life, but be glad that astronomers have finally gotten the confirmation that there is water on other planets.

Although scientists are pretty certain about Mars’ wet past and about Europa’s deep oceans, they have not been able until recently to prove beyond doubt that water exists in other solar systems, outside ours.

In the latest issue of Nature magazine however, astronomers report the existence of water on a far-far-away planet called HD 189733b, a massive celestial body 15% bigger than Jupiter discovered in 2005. The gaseous behemoth orbits a Sun-like star situated at 63 light-years away from us and according to spectrograph analysis operated using NASA’s Spitzer telescope it is ravaged by winds that reach speeds of up to 9,600 kilometers per hour. Moreover, since the distance that separates the planet from its parenting star is only 5,000 kilometers (3.000 miles) – 30 times closer than the Earth is to Sun- the surface temperature reaches a dazzling 1000 degrees Kelvin (1300 degrees Fahrenheit). No life there, I suppose…

However, the good news is that despite these extreme conditions, the planet isn’t totally dry: the same Spitzer telescope showed that HD 189733b soaked up infrared light from its parenting star at several wavelengths, in a pattern expected to prove the existence of water molecules.

"It's definitely convincing," says Heather Knutson, an astronomy graduate student at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., but who did not participate at the study.

Despite convincing evidence that water can “survive” even the eternal scorching summer on HD 189733b, life there is impossible, as astronomers themselves admit it.

Nevertheless, said Giovanna Tinetti of University College in London (UCL), who is lead author of the Nature article, the detection of water on an exo-planet could boost search for extraterrestrial life. “Although HD 189733b is far from being habitable, “ she said, “our discovery shows that water might be more common out there than previously thought, and our method could be used in the future to study more ‘life-friendly’ environments.”

Until now, astronomers have found that the majority of the 227 exo-planets (whose actual existence is deduced from their influence on nearby stars or through their effects on the light traveling towards Earth, rather than direct observations) are inhospitable for life, resembling more to gaseous giants like Jupiter.