Super-hot 'waterworld' is an entirely new class of planet
February 21, 2012 at 7:31 PM
According to astronomer Zachory Berta, "GJ1214b is like no planet we know of." That's because it's almost entirely made up of water — a concept that's hard to drink in when one considers the fact that GJ1214b is a scant 1.3 million miles from its native star and boils at 450 ° Fahrenheit. It's unlike any other planet Hubble has spied to date.
We've known about GJ1214b for a while now. It was first spotted in 2009 by astronomers at the MEarth Project, which uses a group of terrestrial robotic telescopes to do its exoplanet hunting. Now that astronomers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (or CfA) turned the Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3 toward GJ1214b for observation, we know even more. It's a super-Earth about 2.7 times the diameter of Earth, weighs seven times as much and orbits its star every 38 hours thanks to that close-in orbit. It also appears to have a steamy atmosphere — something that was of particular interest to astronomers.
"GJ1214b is like no planet we know of. A huge fraction of its mass is made up of water," Berta, who works at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said in a statement by CfA. He added, "The Hubble measurements really tip the balance in favor of a steamy atmosphere... The high temperatures and high pressures would form exotic materials like 'hot ice' or 'superfluid water' — substances that are completely alien to our everyday experience."
via DVICE
Image credit: NASA, ESA, and D. Aguilar (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics)
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