There's a veritable menagerie of alien worlds out there and astronomers may have spotted the weirdest yet: An exoplanet that 'oozes.'
The exoplanet in question is 55 Cancri e and it orbits a star 40 light-years from Earth. It is also very well known to astronomers -- having been detected in 2004.
In the last few years, our understanding as to the nature of 55 Cancri e has evolved and due to its rapid orbit (of only 18 hours) -- which takes it across the star's disk slightly dimming some starlight from view -- this world is easy to observe.
Astronomers have also worked out its mass and physical size arriving at the conclusion that 55 Cancri e belongs to the rocky "super-Earth" class of exoplanets. It is nearly nine-times the mass of Earth and twice its radius.
Also, due to the close proximity to its parent star, astronomers have long assumed 55 Cancri e to be a barren and hellishly hot world. But now, due to observations by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, all may not be as it seems.
Even though 55 Cancri e has an orbit 26-times closer than Mercury's orbit around the sun, Spitzer has discovered that a fifth of the planet's mass must be composed of light elements and compounds, including water -- potentially liquid water. But don't go getting the idea that 55 Cancri e is covered in oceans lapping alien shores, this water is like nothing we experience in nature.
Any liquids that do exist on or near the 55 Cancri e surface will be in a supercritical fluid state. Usually (at sea level pressures on Earth) water will turn from a liquid to a gas at 100 degrees Celsius (373 Kelvin) -- i.e., the temperature water boils in a kettle. However, if you try to boil water in a high pressure environment, the boiling temperature increases, allowing the water to remain in a liquid state beyond 100 degrees C.
Read more at Discovery News
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