New “Mega Planet” Discovered Orbiting Nearby Star [1]

[2]

The Kepler space telescope has been snapping images of exoplanets, or planets orbiting other stars, and has helped us realize that there could be billions of planets like ours in the galaxy. One of Kepler’s newer finds is something of a ‘mega planet,’ a planet 17 times heavier than the Earth. It even dwarfs other planets classified as super planets.

This mega planet, Kepler-10c, is solid and rocky. It isn’t a gas giant, like Jupiter or Saturn. “Finding Kepler-10c tells us that rocky planets could form much earlier than we thought. And if you can make rocks, you can make life,” lead researcher Dimitar Sasselov says in a press release.