Earth-sized planet found with rocky core
2 Nov WPXI.Com :
Scientists have found a planet way out in the cosmos that's close in
size and content to Earth an astronomical first. But this rocky world is
so close to its Sun that it's almost certainly too hot for
life.Astrophysicists reported on Wednesday in the journal Nature that
the exoplanet Kepler-78b appears to be made of rock and iron, just like
Earth. They measured the planet's mass to determine its density and
content. It's actually a little bigger than Earth and nearly double its
mass, or weight.
Kepler-78b is located in the Cygnus constellation hundreds of light
years away. Incredibly, it orbits its sun every 8 hours, a mystery to
astronomers who doubt it could have formed or moved that close to a
star.
They agree the planet will be sucked up by the sun in a few billion
years, so its time remaining, astronomically speaking, is short. More
than 1,000 exoplanets worlds outside our solar system have been
confirmed so far. Nasa's Kepler Space Telescope, used to discover
Kepler-78b, has identified 3,500 more potential candidates. The
telescope lost its precise pointing ability earlier this year, and Nasa
has given up trying to fix it. Scientific teams in the United States and
Switzerland used ground observatories to measure Kepler-78b. |