| Nearly 2,000 planets have been discovered outside our solar system, but this just might be the strangest one yet. | Ed Mazza The Huffington Post 3-31-16 |
A lava-loaded “super earth” called 55 Cancri e is twice the size of our own planet but eight times as dense. And it’s so close to its star that a year lasts only 18 hours.
Just 40 light years away, 55 Cancri e may also be tidally locked to its sun the way the moon is to Earth. One side would be a blazing hot eternal night with temperatures of 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit, and the other an even hotter permanent day, according to a heat map of the planet published in the journal Nature that used data from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope.
“The day side could possibly have rivers of lava and big pools of extremely hot magma, but we think the night side would have solidified lava flows like those found in Hawaii,” Michael Gillon of the University of Liège in Belgium said in a news release. [...]
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