Weird, oozing super-Earth planet has hot nights, even hotter days
The first super-Earth planet to get its photo taken may be superweird and superhot, and perhaps have super-runny lava in spots on its surface, researchers said.
Astronomers investigated the alien planet 55 Cancri e, the innermost of five known planets orbiting the star 55 Cancri, located about 41 light-years from Earth. This exoplanet is a super-Earth, a rocky world nearly twice Earth's width and eight times its mass. It's the first super-Earth from which astronomers have detected light.
55 Cancri e circles its star about 25 times closer than Mercury does the sun. As a result, the planet whips fully around its star about every 18 hours, while Earth takes a year to complete an orbit.
Previous studies of 55 Cancri e suggested it might possess strange properties. Some work suggested the exoplanet was covered with oozing "supercritical fluids" -- high-pressure, liquidlike, gas-like substances -- while other research suggested the world was made largely of diamond.
To help solve the mysteries of 55 Cancri e, astronomers used NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope to monitor infrared emissions from the exoplanet for 75 hours total during the summer of 2013. The resulting thermal map revealed a strong difference in temperature between the planet's dayside and nightside.
55 Cancri e is tidally locked, meaning it always keeps the same face pointed at its star. On the dayside, temperatures on 55 Cancri e can reach about 4,400 degrees Fahrenheit (2,427 degrees Celsius). On the nightside, temperatures can dip to about 2,025 degrees F (1,107 degrees C). The nightside may be kept warm by heat conducting through the rock from the dayside, said study lead author Brice-Olivier Demory, an astrophysicist at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, England.
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