Enlarge / Laptop-generated conception of the recent, steel planet. (credit score: NASA)
Metals are in all places within the Universe, from scorching gasoline giants the place it rains molten iron to heavy parts shaped as a star goes supernova. Exoplanet GJ 367b one-ups all of them. This planet is made of steel.
GJ 367b is an excessive planet. This “tremendous Mercury,” which orbits its star as soon as each 7.7 hours, was first found by NASA’s TESS planet hunter in 2015. Now, scientists from the College of Turin in Italy and the Thüringer Landessternwarte in Germany have examined newer measurements of the planet utilizing ESO’s HARPS spectrograph together with the unique TESS observations. They discovered that this object is nearly twice as dense as Earth—which suggests it’s most definitely fabricated from cast-iron.
Though GJ 367b is now a cast-iron planet, it might need as soon as been the core of an historical rocky planet.
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