If you’re in the mood for some sci-fi-like vibes, chose a comfy spot at home and checked out the following piece of news.
Experts just found a lava world that’s so dramatic that it could boast a thin regional atmosphere of vaporized rock where it’s closest to its star.
Space.com just noted that the exoplanet was called K2-141b and was originally discovered back in 2017.
According to the official reports, it seems that the world is about half again as big as Earth, but it is orbiting so close to its star. This is one class smaller than our own, and it completes a few loops each Earth-day with the same surface permanently facing the star.
A strange lava world
Experts are predicting those factors mean the fact that two-thirds of the surface of K2-141b is always sunlit. The surface is so lit that a part of the world is covered in a lava ocean – some of the rocs may even evaporate into the atmosphere.
“All rocky planets, including Earth, started off as molten worlds but then rapidly cooled and solidified,” Nicolas Cowan, a planetary scientist at McGill University in Canada and a co-author on the new paper, said in a statement.
The official notes continue and explain that “Lava planets give us a rare glimpse at this stage of planetary evolution.”
We recommend that you check out the complete notes in the official statement.
You should check out the official study in order to learn more details that are currently available.
In other scientific news, not too long ago, it’s been revealed that after it orbited the near-Earth asteroid Bennu for almost two years, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft reached out to its robotic arm in order to collect a sample from the surface of the asteroid, according to the latest reports coming from CNN.
