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| Ker Than for National Geographic News |
| October 6, 2009 |
| The first rocky planet ever discovered outside our solar system has a hellish environment where hot pebbles rain down on oceans of lava, a new study suggests. Located about 500 light-years away in the constellation Monoceros, CoRoT-7b was first discovered in February by the French and European space agencies' CoRoT space telescope. The exoplanet was recently confirmed to be a rocky, Earth-like world—but that's where the similarities with our planet end. CoRoT-7b is about twice the size and five times the mass of Earth, and it's separated from its star by only 1.5 million miles (2.5 million kilometers)—that's about 23 times closer than Mercury is to our sun. On CoRoT-7b a year lasts only 20.4 hours. "It's actually the closest orbit of any exoplanet that's been discovered," said study team member Laura Schaefer, an astronomer at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. |
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