“Super Earth”, First Rocky World Orbitting Another Star Characteristics

January 18th, 2010

Recent discovery of the planet CoRoT-7b (named after the French telescope that discovered it) is a called “Super-Earth”. The planet is orbiting a star about 480 light-years from Earth.

The oddity of the world is pretty intense. Some characteristics of the planet include: rock rains, potentially raging volcanoes, and huge temperature differences between its night and day sides. This hellish rock might also be the remnant core of a former gas giant whose atmosphere long ago evaporated away.

Weighing in at just five times the mass of Earth and not quite two times the Earth’s radius, this extrasolar planet was the first of the more than 400 that have been found to date that was confirmed to be a rocky world, instead of a gas giant.

CoRoT-7b orbits just 1.6 million miles out from its parent star, or 23 times closer than Mercury is to the sun in our solar system. Being this close to its star forces temperatures on the star-facing side of the planet up to a approximately 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit. That side certainly gets all the vitamins for women and the weight loss.

The planet is tidally-locked, so the same side is always facing its star (just as the moon only presents one face to the Earth). The far side of the planet is therefore always in shadow, and temperatures there dip down as low as minus 350 F (minus 210 C).

The possibility that CoRoT-7b’s current appearance may just be the shriveled remains of a former gas giant glory also casts another oddity atop the pile.

“CoRoT-7b may be the first in a new class of planet – evaporated remnant cores,” said Brian Jackson of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.