Posted on 05/06/2011 7:21:02 AM PDT by Red Badger
NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has detected the crossing of a solid planet in front of a star located at only 42 light-years in the constellation Cancer. Thanks to this detection, astronomers know that this "super-Earth" measures 2.1 times the size of our Earth. This is the smallest exoplanet detected in the neighborhood of our Sun.
The discovery is based on data acquired by the Spitzer spacecraft last January. The data allowed astronomers to detect the "transit" of the planet, i.e. the tiny decrease of the star's brightness occurring when the planet passes in front of it.
"So far, the exquisite capabilities of Spitzer have been extensively used to study known transiting exoplanets, all of them being giant planets similar to Jupiter or Neptune. For the first time, Spitzer is used to detect the transit of a super-Earth, a solid planet not much larger than our own Earth," says Michaël Gillon from University of Liège (Belgium), the leader of the team that made this detection. "Thanks to the high-precision of Spitzer, we now know the nature of this planet, and, interestingly, it is very different from all the planets of our solar System."
The planet name is 55 Cancri e. With 8 times the mass of the Earth, for a size 2.1 larger, it is simply too big to be purely rocky, meaning that it must have a significant fraction of ice, the favored composition being a massive shell of water ice on top of a rocky nucleus. "We could call this planet a 'naked Neptune', as it is very similar to Neptune except that it has no gazeous envelope of hydrogen above its ice shell," says Brice-Olivier Demory from the Massachusets Institute of Technology (MIT), the first author of the paper describing the discovery.
(Excerpt) Read more at sciencedaily.com ...
Ironic that the planets they can detect, the “hot Jupiters”, cannot exist in the current secular theory of solar formation.
Then their theory must be flawed.
The very existence of the ‘Hot Jupiters’ means that they must re think their theory.............
Actually our ability to see earth sized planets is very limited. As our instruments improve we may see many that are just the right distant from their suns and they right size to be compared to earth. As for this planet being to big that would depend. If life was created(or evolved if you are an evo)on this planet it would be able to walk around despite the heavy gravity. The cold however might pose a bigger problem.
Scientists probably do want to find earth like planets and exaggerate the ones they do find but sooner or later they will find them.
“naked Neptune”? Didn’t Michelangelo do that?
Actually, the gravity would be tolerable. 2x earth mass means ~1.4g.
True, but “super earth” isn’t one word either. ;)
All his stuff was naked.............
Why do you think Jupiter is so hot?
They hyphenated it............
Dang cheaters!
There is only a certain range of “gravities” in which “large” (say, bigger than a cricket) animals can survive, due to insurmountable physical/chemical limitations.
What does 8 times earth’s mass mean?
Naked Neptune and Hot Jupiter - I'm not sure I like where this is going...
Is there a theological “theory” of solar formation?
How is the theory of solar/stellar formation “secular” any more or less than any other scientific theory?
My bad- I forgot that doubling diameter means 8x volume. Assuming 8x mass that’s about 5g- definitely uncomfortable.
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From looking at the headline, I thought Eliot Spitzer had finally gone over the edge.
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