Densest known rocky planet: Astronomers unveil portrait of 'super-exotic super-Earth...

An international team of astronomers today revealed details of a "super-exotic" exoplanet that would make the planet Pandora in the movie Avatar pale in comparison.

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Family portraits of two planetary systems: A simulation of the silhouette of planet 55 Cancri e passing in front of (“transiting”) its parent star, compared to the Earth and Jupiter transiting our Sun, as seen from outside the Solar System. The MOST space telescope detected the tiny dip in starlight caused when the super-Earth planet blocked a small portion of the disk of the star 55 Cancri A, which is nearly a twin to the Sun.

The planet, named 55 Cancri e, is 60 per cent larger in diameter than Earth but eight times as massive. Twice as dense as Earth – almost as dense as lead – it is the densest solid planet known, according to a team led by astronomers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the University of British Columbia (UBC), the Harvard‑Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and the University of California at Santa Cruz (UCSC).

The research, based on observations from Canada's MOST (Microvariability & Oscillations of STars) space telescope, was released online today at arXiv.org and has been submitted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. MOST is a Canadian Space Agency mission.

Approximately 40 light years from Earth, 55 Cancri e orbits a star – called 55 Cancri A – so closely that its year is less than 18 hours long. "You could set dates on this world by your wrist watch, not a calendar," says UBC astronomer Jaymie Matthews.

The temperature on the planet's surface could be as high as 2,700 degrees Celsius. "Because of the infernal heat, it's unlikely that 55 Cancri e has an atmosphere," says lead author Josh Winn of MIT. "So this is not the type of place where exobiologists would look for life."

However, 55 Cancri e is the type of place exoplanetary scientists will be eager to "visit" with their telescopes, says Winn. "The brightness of the host star makes many types of sensitive measurements possible, so 55 Cancri e is the perfect laboratory to test theories of planet formation, evolution and survival."

While the planet isn't visible, even through a telescope, its host star, 55 Cancri A, can be observed with the naked eye for the next two months on a clear dark night.

"On this world – the densest solid planet found anywhere so far, in the Solar System or beyond – you would weigh three times heavier than you do on Earth. By day, the sun would look 60 times bigger and shine 3,600 times brighter in the sky," says Matthews, MOST Mission Scientist and second author on the paper.

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How to point to an alien world tonight: Amateur exoplanet hunters in North America and Europe can go outside, away from city lights, and see the star 55 Cancri A for themselves. Around 10 pm local time, look southwest, below the Big Dipper, near the northern tip of the brightest stars in the constellation Cancer (the Crab). This view of the sky shown is from Vancouver, Canada, on the night of 28 April 2011, but the view will be similar for all mid-northern latitudes...

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reply to post by gdaub23


Fascinating read, thank you. The density thing im having a hard time with. Mainly with what that would mean exactly. What if the earth were that dense, but everything else was still the same. Just trying to wrap my head around the implications of this. Interesting find

So theoretically, we can see more planets right now than just the moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune, we also have 55 Cancri e in the night sky during this relatively rare alignment. If you never said anything I would never have known.

Interesting, thanks for the post.

Correlating to our own solar system its apparent that the planet densities increase with proximity to the sun. Planet densities Its curious that we have also discovered close orbiting gas giants around alien suns that are not dense at all and orbit in astronomical speeds, some less than an earth day.

I wonder what's behind these wide variances of planet formations. Intriguing indeed.