55 Cancri e – Most Exotic World We Can Only Imagine

MessageToEagle.com – This is not an alien world, anyone of us will ever be able to visit.

It’s not very far away, only about 40 light years from Earth, but it circles dangerously close to a stellar inferno, completing one orbit in only 18 hours. The alien planet, discovered in 2004 and named “55 Cancri e” is 26 times closer to its parent star than Mercury is to the Sun.

The temperature on the surface of 55 Cancri e is estimated to be as high as 2,700 degrees Celsius.

Astronomers are still able to take a closer look on the planet through their telescopes.

“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. If Earth were in the same position, the soil beneath our feet would heat up to about 3200 F.

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.”

55 Cancri e was the subject of observations conducted 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 first planet discovered around 55 Cancri A – designated “b” – was found by a California-based team in 1997 and the same team found also two more planets (“c” and “d”) over the next five years.

In 2004, a Texas-based team of astronomers found 55 Cancri e.

All five planets were detected using the Doppler technique, where a star’s “wobbles” due to the gravities of its unseen planets are measured in the shifting wavelengths of the spectra of the starlight.

55 Cancri e, is 60 per cent larger in diameter than Earth and eight times as massive. Twice as dense as Earth – almost as dense as lead – it is the densest solid planet known.

“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,” UBC astronomer Jaymie Matthews said.

See also:

Bizarre Alien Planets Made Of Exotic Hot Ice

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Is 55 Cancri e a wasteland of parched rock?

Apparently it is not. Based on observations made by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, 55 Cancri e may be wetter and weirder than anyone imagined.

About a fifth of the planet’s mass must be made of light elements and compounds–including water. Given the intense heat and high pressure these materials likely experience, researchers think the compounds likely exist in a “supercritical” fluid state.

A supercritical fluid is a high-pressure, high-temperature state of matter best described as a liquid-like gas, and a marvelous solvent. Water becomes supercritical in some steam turbines–and it tends to dissolve the tips of the turbine blades. Supercritical carbon dioxide is used to remove caffeine from coffee beans, and sometimes to dry-clean clothes. Liquid-fueled rocket propellant is also supercritical when it emerges from the tail of a spaceship.

On 55 Cancri e, this stuff may be literally oozing–or is it steaming?

With supercritical solvents rising from the planet’s surface, a star of terrifying proportions filling much of the daytime sky, and whole years rushing past in a matter of hours, 55 Cancri e teaches a valuable lesson: Just because a planet is similar in size to Earth does not mean the planet is like Earth.

Spitzer recently measured the extraordinarily small amount of light 55 Cancri e blocks when it crosses in front of its star. These transits occur every 18 hours, giving researchers repeated opportunities to gather the data they need to estimate the width, volume and density of the planet.

According to the new observations, 55 Cancri e has a mass 7.8 times and a radius just over twice that of Earth. Those properties place 55 Cancri e in the “super-Earth” class of exoplanets, a few dozen of which have been found. Only a handful of known super-Earths, however, cross the face of their stars as viewed from our vantage point in the cosmos, so 55 Cancri e is better understood than most.

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source: NASA

Spitzer Space Telescope