{"id":27785,"date":"2013-11-01T08:34:21","date_gmt":"2013-11-01T12:34:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/?p=27785"},"modified":"2013-11-01T08:34:21","modified_gmt":"2013-11-01T12:34:21","slug":"earth-sized-planet-hell-discovered","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/2013\/11\/earth-sized-planet-hell-discovered\/","title":{"rendered":"Earth-sized “Planet Hell” Discovered!"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>The space scientists are baffled after finding the first ever Earth-sized planet, which has the same density as our home world, and violates all known planetary formation theories by its existence.<\/p>\n

The discovery of Kepler-78b was made by two separate groups of astronomers in the US and Switzerland, who were analyzing data from NASA\u2019s Kepler Space Telescope.<\/p>\n

The new planet orbits a sun-like Kepler-78 star in the Cygnus or Swan constellation some 400 light years away from Earth.<\/p>\n

The scientists say that Kepler-78b is unique as it\u2019s the first known Earth-sized planet, which has a density similar to Earth.<\/p>\n

Despite being twice as heavy, it\u2019s just 20 per cent larger than Earth and is believed to be composed of the same rock and iron as our home world.<\/p>\n

But this is where the similarities end as the astronomers stressed that life is impossible on Kepler-78b, which Andrew W. Howard from the University of Hawaii described \u201cas one of the most hellish\u201d<\/em> places ever discovered.<\/p>\n

The planet is a lava world where the surface temperatures exceed 1000 Celcius, \u201cwell above the temperature where rock melts,\u201d<\/em> Howard told the New York Times.<\/p>\n

Such extreme conditions are caused by Kepler-78b\u2019s super tight orbit, which overturns the existing knowledge on planetary formation.<\/p>\n

The planet circles around its star in just eight and a half hours at a distance of less than a million miles (around 1.6 million kilometers). By contrast, Earth is 93 million miles (around 150 million kilometers) away from the sun, completing a full circle around it in 365 days.<\/p>\n

According to current theories, Kepler-78b couldn’t have formed so close to its star as its orbit would\u2019ve been inside the sun when the system was taking shape.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt couldn’t have formed in place because you can’t form a planet inside a star. It couldn’t have formed further out and migrated inward, because it would have migrated all the way into the star. This planet is an enigma,\u201d<\/em> Dimitar Sasselov, a member of Dr. Pepe\u2019s team, told the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) website.<\/p>\n

Another CfA astronomer, David Latham, acknowledged that modern science doesn\u2019t \u201cknow how it formed or how it got to where it is today,\u201d<\/em> calling Kepler-78b \u201ca complete mystery.\u201d<\/p>\n

However, Latham stressed that the newly discovered planet \u201cisn\u2019t going to last forever.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

In three billion years, the gravitational tides will draw Kepler-78b close to the sun and it\u2019ll eventually be ripped part.<\/p>\n

Kepler-78b is one of more than 150 planets, which NASA\u2019s Kepler Space Telescope spotted by registering dimming of the starlight when a planet passes in front of it.<\/p>\n

The spacecraft was launched in 2009, but went out of order this May, with the US Space Agency saying that it won\u2019t be making attempts to resume its operations.<\/p>\n

But the amount of data on exoplanets (planets outside the Solar system), which Kepler managed to collect, will take several years for the astronomers to analyze.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The space scientists are baffled after finding the first ever Earth-sized planet, which has the same density as our home world, and violates all known planetary formation theories by its… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[128],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27785"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27785"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27785\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27785"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27785"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27785"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}