Godzilla of Earths planet discovered, weighs 17 times as much as earthJun 3, 2014, 12.41PM IST TNN[Kounteya Sinha]Astronomers have announced that they have discovered a new type of planet - a rocky world weighing 17 times as much as Earth.LONDON: The first ever mega earth - a gigantic super planet with a diameter of about 18,000 miles, 2.3 times as large as Earth and being called the Godzilla of Earths has now been discovered.Astronomers have announced that they have discovered a new type of planet - a rocky world weighing 17 times as much as Earth.Kepler-10c as it has been scientifically named circles a sun like star once every 45 days. It is located about 560 light-years from Earth in the constellation Draco.The system also hosts a three-Earth-mass lava world, Kepler-10 b, in a remarkably fast, 20-hour orbit.Theorists believed such a world couldnt form because anything so hefty would grab hydrogen gasas it grew and become a Jupiter-like gas giant.This planet, though, is all solid and much bigger than previously discovered super-Earths, making it a mega-Earth.We were very surprised when we realized what we had found, says astronomer Xavier Dumusque of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA).This is the Godzilla of Earths adds CfA researcher Dimitar Sasselov, director of the Harvard Origins of Life Initiative. But unlike the movie monster, Kepler-10c has positive implications for life.Its sheer size puts it in the category of planets known as mini-Neptunes which have thick, gaseous envelopes.Kepler-10c was originally spotted by NASAs Kepler spacecraft. Kepler finds planets using the transit method, looking for a star that dims when a planet passes infront of it. By measuring the amount of dimming, astronomerscan calculate the planets physicalsize or diameter. However, Keplercant tell whether a planet is rockyor gassy.The team used the HARPS-North instrument on the Telescopio Nazionale Galileo (TNG) in the Canary Islands to measure the mass of Kepler-10c. This showed that Kepler-10c must have a dense composition of rocks and other solids.Kepler-10c didnt lose its atmosphere over time. Its massive enough to have held onto one if it ever had it, explains Dumusque. It must have formed the way we see it now.CfA astronomer Lars A Buchhave also found a correlation between the period of a planet (how long ittakes to orbit its star) and the sizeat which a planet transitions fromrocky to gaseous. This suggests that more mega-Earths will be found as planet hunters extend their data to longer-period orbits.The discovery that Kepler-10c is a mega-Earth also has profound implications for the history of the universe and the possibility of life. The Kepler-10 system is about 11 billion years old, which means it formed less than 3 billion years after the Big Bang.The early universe contained onlyhydrogen and helium. Heavier elements needed to make rocky planets, like silicon and iron, had to be created in the first generations of stars. When those stars exploded, they scattered these crucial ingredients through space, which then could be incorporated into later generations of stars and planets.This process should have taken billions of years. However, Kepler-10c shows that the universe was able to form such huge rocks even during the time when heavy elements were scarce.Finding Kepler-10c tells us that rocky planets could form much earlier than we thought. And if you can make rocks, you can make life, says Sasselov.This research implies that astronomers shouldnt rule out old stars when they search for Earth-like planets. And if old starscan host rocky Earths too, then we have a better chance of locating potentially habitable worlds in our cosmic neighbourhood.
Posted on: Wed, 29 Oct 2014 07:16:01 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015