A planet previously announced by NASA in 2011 now has astronomers referring to it as the ‘Godzilla of Earths’.
A planet previously announced by NASA in 2011 now has astronomers referring to it as the ‘Godzilla of Earths’.
Called Kepler-10c, its mass is about 17 times greater than Earth’s. Kepler-10c is a bit of a mystery to experts, as they had always believed any planet that huge would pull so much hydrogen on to itself that it would bear a similar resemblance to either Jupiter or Neptune.
But instead of being a gaseous world, this one appears to be rocky and may have a thin atmosphere. Dimitar Sasselov with Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics remarked “This is the Godzilla of Earths! But unlike the movie monster, Kepler-10c has positive implications for life… Finding Kepler-10c tells us that rocky planets could form much earlier than we thought. And if you can make rocks, you can make life.”
Kepler-10c orbits around its parent star once every 45 days and also has a sibling - Kepler 10b which is referred to as a 'lava world'.
First discovered by NASA’s Kepler spacecraft, the discovery that the baffling planet is composed of rocks was conducted with the HARPS-North instrument on the Telescopio Nazionale Galileo in the Canary Islands, and findings pertaining to the discovery were unveiled at the 224th American Astronomical Society meeting.
