A new type of “Godzilla” planet, so named due to its enormous size, has been found 560 light years from Earth, enhancing the possibility of discovering rocky planets that could support life.
The planet, Kepler-10c, has been dubbed a “mega-Earth” and is 17 times as huge as our own.
Because they thought something so massive would absorb hydrogen gas as it developed and transform into a gaseous “mini-Neptune,” astronomers did not think such a world could exist.
In a far-off star system, a new type of “Godzilla” planet known as a mega-Earth has been found. A representation of the recently discovered planet, which takes up most of the foreground, is shown. In the background, its brother, the lava world Kepler-10b, may be seen.
However, Kepler-10c has remained stable despite being more than twice as ancient as the Earth, much to their amazement.
The finding shows that potentially habitable rocky planets may be much more frequent than previously believed, and some may even be very old. With an estimated age of 11 billion years, the Kepler-10 star system emerged less than three billion years after the universe first began.
In contrast, Earth is only about 4.5 billion years old.
This is the Earth’s Godzilla. Kepler-10c, however, has good implications for life, unlike the monster from the movie, according to Dr. Dimitar Sasselov of the Harvard Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics (CFA).
The discovery of Kepler-10c suggests that rocky planets may have formed more earlier than previously assumed. You can create life if you can create rocks.
Kepler- 10c isn’t likely to harbour life as it is too close to its parents star. Gravity at the surface is about twice that of Earth’s gravity.
Every 45 days, the planet revolves around its sun-like parent star, Draco, in the constellation.
Kepler-10b, a searing hot “lava world” three times heavier than Earth, orbits the star once every 20 hours and is at least one of its peculiar neighbors.
The planet was first discovered by NASA’s Kepler spacecraft, which searches for stars that dim when a planet passes in front of them in order to locate planets.
Astronomers can determine the physical size of the planet by measuring the dimming.
Before, it was believed that Kepler-10c, a planet with a diameter more than twice that of the Earth, belonged to the class of “mini-Neptune” planets, which have icy cores encased in dense gaseous envelopes.
However, observations from the Italian Galileo National Telescope in the Canary Islands revealed that it is significantly heavier than anticipated, having 17 times the mass of the Earth.
This demonstrated that it has to be composed of heavy rocks like the Earth.
The research’s principal investigator, astronomer Dr. Xavier Dumusque of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, remarked, “We were really shocked when we realized what we had uncovered.”
Kepler-10c’s atmosphere didn’t degrade over time. It must have formed the way we see it now because it is large enough to have held onto one, assuming it ever did.
According to CFA astronomer Lars Buchhave, there is a connection between a planet’s period, or the amount of time it takes to complete an orbit around its star, and its size at which a planet transitions from rocky to gaseous.
And if old stars can host rocky Earths too, he said, then we have a better chance of locating potentially habitable worlds in our cosmic neighborhood.
Kepler- 10c was originally spotted by Nasa’s Kepler spacecraft (artist’s impression pictured), which finds planets using the transit method, looking for a star that dims when a planet passes in front of it. By measuring the dimming, scientists can calculate the planet’s physical size
