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Astro Bob blog: Mega-Earth discovery confounds astronomers, hints at life's ancient roots

Rooting around extrasolar planetary systems like paleontologists on a dinosaur dig astronomers have found a remarkable new planet 17 times more massive than Earth. Improbably, it's made of rock.

892376+Kepler 10c NASA.jpg — Artist's conception of Kepler-10c (foreground) and its sibling, the lava world Kepler-10b,orbiting the sunlike star Kepler 10. Kepler-10c has a diameter of about 18,000 miles, 2.3 times as large as Earth, and weighs 17 times as much. It may also possess a thin atmosphere. Credit: David A. Aguilar, Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics

By Robert King

June 03, 2014 at 10:18 AM

Rooting around extrasolar planetary systems like paleontologists on a dinosaur dig astronomers have found a remarkable new planet 17 times more massive than Earth. Improbably, it's made of rock.

By Robert King