#kepler-10c

An artist's illustration of the mega-Earth planet Kepler-10c, the"Godzilla of Earths" planet that is 2.3 times the size of Earth and 17 times heavier. The planet and its lava-world sibling Kepler 10b (background) orbit the star Kepler-10 about 570 light-years from Earth, in the constellation Draco. 

For more information, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/ames/kepler/astronomers-confounded-by-massive-rocky-world/#.U6ipGpSwJyx

Image courtesy of N.A.S.A.

My new blog which looks at analogies and metaphors, and what happens when they are used poorly.

Check out my latest post on "Godzilla-sized Earth" Kepler-10c, which is not actually "Godzilla-sized" (it is a fairly in-depth discussion).

Please check it out at the link or at the Wordpress site: http://aseriesofanalogies.wordpress.com.

http://creofire.com/new-class-exoplanet/

A New Class of Exoplanet

An Exoplanet is said to be a planet situated outside the Solar system. On Jan. 2013, Astronomers announced that there might be as many as 400 billion exoplanets in the ‘Milky Way Galaxy.’ On Feb. 2014, NASA’s Kepler space telescope was said to have verified 715 exoplanets posited around 305 Star...

Read Comfortably from Creofire.com

Astronomers have discovered a rocky planet that weighs 17 times as much as Earth and is more than twice as large in size. This discovery has planet formation theorists challenged to explain how such a world could have formed.

The Kepler mission has provided yet more stimulus for planetary science by finding a planet larger than expected for a rocky, Earth-like planet (Kepler-10c, 17 times the mass of Earth and more than twice as large in size).

According to current theories of planet formation, the gravity of a planet of this size should have captured large amounts of gases, mostly hydrogen and helium, which would have turned the planet into a gas giant.

Kepler-10c is close in to its sun-like star and orbits every 45 days, so if the planet had followed the anticipated course of development it would have been a Hot Jupiter (or, if you prefer, an epistellar Jovian), but Kepler-10c is apparently a Hot Jupiter that never happened, and, like the dog that didn't bark in the night, we want to know why. Is this the result of some mechanism of planet formation of which we were heretofore unaware, or might it be a freakish exception, the result of some ancient planetary cataclysm (say, for example, a collision that tore away most of the atmosphere)?

You could think of Kepler-10c as a "failed" Hot Jupiter, in the way that brown dwarfs are sometimes called "failed" stars, and some theorists of the anthropic cosmological principle call a universe without life (i.e., life capable of reflexively observing that universe) a "failed" universe, but this is to import unacceptable teleological conceptions into planetary science. 

Keep in mind that, before the discovery of a great many Hot Jupiters (which, as exoplanets, are relatively easy to discover because their gravity tugs significantly at the star they orbit), these too were considered unlikely. All the gas giants in our solar system occupy outer orbits, so if you take our solar system as normative (i.e., if you relinquish a Copernican perspective), a Hot Jupiter seems like a planetological pathology.

Jonathan Frahm Staff Writer @JNoodles_

Astronomers have recently found a massive, rocky planet that weighs in at 17 times the size of Earth and is more than twice its overall size.

The discovery of the planet, currently known as Kepler-10c or “the Godzilla of Earths,” has astronomers totally dumbfoundedas it was previously not thought that a planet completely made of rock could form. Of the…