What a dramatic planet!
Astronomers have found a weird planet orbiting a very Sun-like star. Called K2-360b, the planet is 1.6 times Earth’s diameter, but 7.7 times its mass. That makes it dense: with an average density of 11 grams per cubic centimeter, it’s twice as dense as Earth! That’s literally as dense as lead. That mass and size makes its surface gravity three times Earth’s. If you could stand on it (which I would not recommend for many reasons, as you’ll see) you’d weigh three times what you do here.
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Its size makes it a super-Earth, an exoplanet less than about twice Earth’s diameter. Why is it so dense? It likely started off life more like Neptune, with a thick atmosphere, but over time its ridiculously close orbit to the star meant its atmosphere got stripped away by the intense heat. What was left was the rocky-metallic core. The astronomers who did this research ran some models of what the interior is like, it’s likely to be about 50% core, which would explain the density; the cores of such planets are mostly metals. Fun place.
It’s close enough to its star to melt lead and iron, which immediately made me think of the phrase my brother and I would chant while capering about plotting mischief…”Molten metal! Molten metal!”.
I think we identified with Quasimodo in that old movie.
But Muskrat will get you there. Well, nah… he won’t, actually, but he’ll promise! If only you’ll pledge to serve him for the rest of your miserable life, with your heart, mind and body. Such a good trade! Leave a verdant, green planet for some shitty hell hole, which you won’t even get to…ever. Dumbass geeks.
PZ, please keep searching, maybe you can find a planet where we can live without all the destruction of the all the rtwingnut xtian terrorists. Because, it sure looks like this planet will soon be ‘molten metal’!
You shouldn’t have posted that video. It might give Musk ideas for when disgruntled MAGAts storm the White House.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dashuhua
(rather spectacular, I’ve seen videos)
What’s the housing market like? I could cope if it’s cheap
“Molten Metal” sounds like a garage band that plays covers. The lead singer is probably a college dropout who couldn’t face PZ’s criticism of the poor writing skills endemic to undergraduate science papers. (The drummer is almost certainly related to Mick Shrimpton.)
Yes! Phil Plait linked in the OP! That’s been a while.. Great bloke and astronomer despite his former blog’s title.
Dunno if its the impact of Trump but so far seems this world is NOT on the NASA Exoplanet Catalog (their spelling) :
https://science.nasa.gov/exoplanets/exoplanet-catalog/
Oh & its not on wikipedia or at least doesn’t have a wikipage yet too. LABEL
Interesting side note about super-Earths, which seem quite common in other systems we’ve examined. One reason our system doesn’t have them near the sun could be that Jupiter did a walkabout towards the sun in its early days, wreaking some havoc before being pulled back out by gravitational interaction with Saturn.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_tack_hypothesis#Absent_super-Earths
Just saw that WNED (PBS Buffalo) will be airing the episode of Brian Cox’s The Planets dealing with this subject, at 9:30 pm EST.