A FIERY ‘super-Earth’ planet covered in oceans of lava will soon be explored by NASA.
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is just weeks away from full operation, and one of its first missions is to explore a hot exoplanet called 55 Cancri e, the US space agency said last week.
55 Cancri e, also known as Janssen, is located just 50 light-years from Earth.
It orbits so close to its sun-like star Copernicus (just 1.5 million miles) that its burning surface literally resembles the biblical description of hell.
“The molten surface is completely uninhabitable,” NASA said in a statement.
“With surface temperatures well above the melting point of typical rock-forming minerals, the dayside of the planet is believed to be covered in oceans of lava.”
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An entire year on Janssen lasts just a few hours, and one hemisphere may be in permanently blazing daylight while the other is in endless darkness, NASA added.
It is so close to its sun—one twenty-fifth the distance between Mercury and the sun—that “oceans boil away, rocks begin to melt, and clouds of lava are raining down.”
Since there is nothing like 55 Cancri e in our own solar system, scientists are naturally looking for more insight into the planet.
One of the things researchers hope to find out is whether the exoplanet is “tidally locked,” meaning one side always faces the star.
Early observations from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope show that Janssen’s hottest spot is not directly opposite its star, which researchers say is odd.
One proposed theory, however, is that the planet “has a dynamic atmosphere that displaces heat,” NASA says.
“That could explain why the hottest part of the planet has shifted,” explains Alexis Brandeker, a researcher from Stockholm University who leads another team studying the planet.
“Just like on Earth, it would take a while for the surface to warm up. The hottest time of the day would be noon, not exactly noon.”
This moves on to another area of interest for scientists, which is to discover whether the planet has a thick atmosphere dominated by oxygen or nitrogen.
“If it has an atmosphere, [Webb] has the sensitivity and wavelength range to detect it and determine what it’s made of,” said Renyu Hu of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.
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JWST will spend its entire first year studying 55 Cancri e and a second super-Earth planet called LHS 3844 b to better understand
the evolution of rocky planets like Earth.”
Super-Earths are a class of exoplanets with masses greater than Earth’s, but significantly lower than Uranus and Neptune, which are 14.5 and 17 times Earth’s, respectively.
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