Researchers have discovered an exoplanet with the potential to harbor life and believe it is completely covered in water.

The exoplanet is called TOI-1452 b and orbits two stars in the Draco constellation not far away, about 100 light-years from Earth.

NASA's TESS space telescope, which regularly surveys the sky for potential distant planets, first pointed to the floating rocks, but Charles Cadieux of the University of Montreal and his team confirmed the planet's size and radius.

It took more than 50 hours to verify that what they were looking at was a planet five times the size of Earth.

Additional observation confirmed that although this planet is much larger than Earth, it is much less dense, suggesting that water could make up a significant portion of its mass.

René Doyon, a professor at the University of Montreal who led Cadieux in his research, said, "So it looks very much like a planet that could be a water world, with a vast ocean."

Although water covers 70 percent of Earth's surface, it makes up less than 1 percent of its mass. In comparison, researchers believe TOI-1452 b could be composed of 30 percent water, similar to Jupiter's moons Ganymede and Callisto and Saturn's moons Titan and Enceladus.

Doyon, who is also director of the Observatoire du Mont-Mégantic (OMM) in the Eastern Townships, said, "This is a very strange world we've never encountered before."

The high-precision PESTO telescope at the observatory played a pivotal role in the discovery, confirming the planet's radius and that it orbits a binary star system.

Time passes quickly on this planet — one year is only 11 days.

Canadian technology played a bigger role as the team used the SPIRou instrument, a tool partially designed in Canada that measures low-mass stars.

Further analysis is needed to confirm more characteristics of the exoplanet, but Doyon said he is proud of what his team has identified so far.