lava world tagged posts

In the search for extraterrestrial life, it makes sense to first look for rocky planets with an atmosphere, like Earth. Without an atmosphere, a planet can’t have surface water. But of the more than 6,300 exoplanets cataloged thus far, the vast majority are not rocky, and only a handful of the rocky worlds appear to have an atmosphere.

In a study published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, a group led by University of Chicago scientist Brandon Park Coy reports another: a rocky super-Earth 154 light-years away in the constellation Pisces...

A scorching “lava world” once thought barren may actually be wrapped in a thick, mysterious atmosphere. Astronomers have uncovered surprising evidence of a thick atmosphere surrounding TOI-561 b, a scorching, fast-orbiting rocky planet once thought too extreme to hold onto any gas...

This is an illustration of 55 Cancri e. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

The most detailed map of a small, rocky ‘super Earth’ to date reveals a planet almost completely covered by lava, with a molten ‘hot’ side and solid ‘cool’ side. Conditions on the hot side of the planet are so extreme that it may have caused the atmosphere to evaporate, with the result that conditions on the 2 sides of the planet vary widely: temperatures on the hot side can reach 2500C, while temperatures on the cool side are around 1100C.

Using data from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, the researchers examined a planet known as 55 Cancri e, which orbits a sun-like star located 40 light years away in the Cancer constellation, and have mapped how conditions on the planet change throughout a complete orbit, the first time this...