Super Earth Discovered

First off, let me emphatically state, there are BILLIONS of planets in our universe. Not very long ago, space scientists expected that if other stars had solar systems, they’d be much like our own – small, rocky planets (like Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars) orbiting close to their host star, with gas giants (think of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune) farther out. There were good reasons for this, not the least of which was that any self-respecting star would tear a Jupiter-sized planet apart if it were too close. Everything made sense.

So much for that.

Since the 1990s, astrophysicists report they have identified at least 600 stars with planets circling them and found that solar systems like ours are a rarity.

Take Kepler 36, reported in the journal Science. It’s a solar system about 1,200 light-years from our own, with two very different planets right on top of each other. One is a rocky “super Earth,” about 1.5 times as large as our world. The other is a gaseous “hot Neptune,” about 3.7 times as large.

Both worlds are probably infernos, so close to their host star that they zip around it in 14 and 16 Earth-days, respectively. That means they pass very close to each other – less than five times as far apart as our moon is from us. If you’ve ever been struck by moonrise on a summer night, imagine a world about 12 times as large.

Looking from the smaller planet’s surface (as depicted above), the gas giant would appear more than twice as big as the full Moon appears from Earth. The wrenching gravity between the planets would stretch and squeeze them, which might make the rocky one volcanic.

Light from an alien “super-Earth” twice the size of our own Earth has been detected by a NASA space telescope for the first time, in what astronomers are calling a historic achievement.

NASA’s infrared Spitzer Space Telescope spotted light from the alien planet 55 Cancri e, which orbits a star 41 light-years from Earth. A day on the extrasolar planet lasts just 18 hours. The planet 55 Cancri e was first discovered in 2004 and is not a habitable world. Instead, it is known as a super-Earth because of its size: The world is about twice the width of Earth and has about eight times the mass of Earth.

Spitzer first detected infrared light from an alien planet in 2005. But that world was “hot Jupiter,” a gas giant planet much larger than 55 Cancri e that orbited extremely close to its parent star. Other telescopes have performed similar feats since then, but Spitzer’s view of the 55 Cancri e is the first time the light from a rocky super-Earth type planet has been seen, researchers said. 55 Cancri e stood out because it orbits extremely close to its parent star — about 26 times closer than the distance between Mercury and our own sun. The new Spitzer observations revealed that the star-facing side of 55 Cancri e is extremely hot, with temperatures reaching up to 3,140 degrees Fahrenheit (1,726 degrees Celsius). The planet is likely a dark world that lacks the substantial atmosphere needed to warm its nighttime side, researchers said.

To top it all off, the planet is oozing. Past observations of the planet by the Spitzer Space Telescope have suggested that one-fifth of 55 Cancri e is made up of lighter elements, including water. But the extreme temperatures and pressures on 55 Cancri e would create what scientists call a “supercritical fluid” state. Supercritical fluids can be imagined as a gas in a liquid state, which can occur under extreme pressures and temperatures. On Earth, water can become a supercritical fluid inside some steam engines. Spitzer’s new look at 55 Cancri e is consistent with supercritical-fluid waterworld theory. The planet is likely a rocky world covered with water in a supercritical fluid state and topped off with a steam blanket, researchers said. “It could be very similar to Neptune, if you pulled Neptune in toward our sun and watched its atmosphere boil away,” said the study’s principal investigator, Michael Gillon of Universite de Liege in Belgium. The lead author is Brice-Olivier Demory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass.

In April 2007, a team headed by Stéphane Udry based in Switzerland announced the discovery of two new super-Earths around Gliese 581, both on the edge of the habitable zone around the star where liquid water may be possible on the surface. With Gliese 581 c having a mass of at least 5 Earth masses and a distance from Gliese 581 of 0.073 astronomical units (AU; 6.8 million mi, 11 million km), it is on the “warm” edge of the habitable zone around Gliese 581 with an estimated mean temperature (without taking into consideration effects from an atmosphere) of −3 degrees Celsius with an albedo comparable to Venus and 40 degrees Celsius with an albedo comparable to Earth. Subsequent research suggests Gliese 581 c has likely suffered a runaway greenhouse effect like Venus, but that its sister planet, Gliese 581 d, does in fact lie within the star’s habitable zone, with an orbit at 0.22 AU and a mass of 7.7 Earths.

Super-Earths would be more geologically active than Earth, with more vigorous plate tectonics due to thinner plates under more stress. In fact, models suggest that Earth was itself a “borderline” case, just barely large enough to sustain plate tectonics.However, other studies determine that strong convection currents in the mantle acting on strong gravity would make the crust stronger and thus inhibit plate tectonics. The planet’s surface would be too strong for the forces of magma to break the crust into plates.

Until Astronomers are absolutely sure about these planets, don’t pack your bags.

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