Quote'Godzilla of Earths' identified
By Jonathan Amos
Science correspondent, BBC News
There is a new class of planet out there that astronomers are calling the "mega-Earth".
It is an object with a hard surface like our own world but much, much bigger.
The necessity for the new designation follows the discovery of a planet which has a mass some 17 times that of Earth.
Known as Kepler-10c, it orbits a star about 560 light-years away. Scientists described its properties at an American Astronomical Society meeting in Boston.
They confess it is something of a head-scratcher.
Theorists had always thought that any planet that large would pull so much hydrogen on to itself that it would look more like a Neptune or a Jupiter.
"We were very surprised when we realised what we had found," said Xavier Dumusque of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA), who led the research team.
"This is the Godzilla of Earths!" added the CfA's Dimitar Sasselov, the director of the Harvard Origins of Life Initiative. "But unlike the movie monster, Kepler-10c has positive implications for life."
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Rest of item here:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-27669572 (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-27669572)
I dunno. Most of the Heisei series is disappointing in one way or another.
(https://languish.org/forums/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fi13.photobucket.com%2Falbums%2Fa299%2FSlayhem%2FTurtle.jpg&hash=465ab806527a8aa387fb5d5977fb1adefa8b7526)