* The new world, 'Mega Earth' discovered
Contrary to age long theory that there is no other all-solid planet except planet Earth, scientists think they may have found not just one, but three.
The new planet named 'Mega Earth', first spotted by NASA’s Kepler space telescope, is reported to be about 2.3 times larger than Earth.
A follow-up observations of the planet, designated as Kepler-10c, show it has 17 times as much mass as Earth.
It is said to be filled with rock and other materials much heavier than hydrogen and helium.
“Kepler-10c is a big problem for the theory,” astronomer Dimitar Sasselov, director of the Harvard Origins of Life Initiative, told Discovery News. “It’s nice that we have a solid piece of evidence and measurements for it because that gives motivations to the theorists to improve the theory,” he said.
Scientists are not sure how mega-Earths, or their diminutive cousins, super-Earths, form, nor why our solar system has nothing in between the largest rocky planet, Earth, and the smallest gas giant, Neptune.
The finding of another type of rocky planet has implications in the search for life beyond Earth.
Kepler-10c, which has a diameter of about 18,000 miles, is one of two discovered around the sun-like star Kepler-10, located about 560 light years from Earth in the constellation Draco.
Its sister planet, Kepler-10b, was the first rocky planet found beyond the solar system.
The planets' parent star is much older than the sun, raising another question about how stars dating back to the earliest days of the universe pulled together the materials to form rocky planets, especially big ones.
"We thought that old stars don’t have enough solid material yet to form many rocky planets and hence habitable rocky planets around older stars would be scarce. Probably we were wrong about that. When we are thinking about searching for habitable planets, we shouldn’t discount the very old stars," Sassalov said.
No comments:
Post a Comment