oh my fucknign god
2 cold friendo
If it’s 4x the size and 10x the mass (like the article says) of earth isn’t it a possibility that there’s still geothermal energy being put out? I know Mars grew cold a long time ago and it’s only marginally smaller in comparison, so theoretically there could be life that uses geothermal vents for energy, possibly underwater. People have speculated similarly about one of the moons of Jupiter (but in that case the energy was coming from tidal friction from Jupiter)
Look I’ve been up for 29 hours so my math is probably off but if something is 4x the diameter and 10x the mass of earth, it would be just way too dense to be made of anything other than, like, solid metal.
So I went and looked at the academic paper and they never even mention it being 4x the size of earth. The caltech news article that I pulled up (remember these researchers are from caltech) never mention a 4x size number either. I have no idea where The Guardian got that number, but I found the Washington Post mentions it too, but it’s never mentioned anywhere in any scientific news sources, so I’m disregarding it entirely.
The only thing mentioning the possible dimensions in the academic paper is that it’s between 1 and 10 times the mass of Earth.
Because the only thing we have is mass, there’s no way to determine density or that it’s a rocky planet like people seem to default it to.
Logically, it would probably be a gas giant similar to both Uranus and Neptune. Uranus is 15 earth masses and Neptune is 17 earth masses. It would probably have a very similar composition with a miles thick atmosphere, then underneath that, miles and miles of ice, and below that, a tiny rocky core.
So from that, and because the rocky core is actually quite small, (most likely smaller than that of Earth) it probably isn’t geothermally active anymore.
The language of the article seemed to imply it was a rocky planet, at least that’s how it seemed to me, and at the time of reading it I had also been up for more than a day and now I’ve realized we have no bloody clue what it’s made of because we’re not even sure it exists. I believe the assumption comes from general patterns in exoplanets that we’ve found in the past several years, and there are rocky bodies many times the mass of the earth, in fact we’ve found many more of those than we have planets with similar masses to the Earth. The question was mentioned in the article that if they’re so common why doesn’t our solar system have any, the answer to that question was well maybe this one is.
It is a possibility that it has 10x the mass and the basic same layering as Earth. Although from what I’ve learned of Earth’s formation we do have an unusually large iron core, in comparison to say Mars, due to the collision that formed our moon. It is a strong possibility that it’s another gas giant but ya know. Ice aliens.
”in fact we’ve found many more of those than we have planets with similar masses to the Earth.”
That’s because Kepler, the telescope that’s finding all these exoplanets, is doing so by looking at light curves from distant stars. Only large planets cause noticeable light dips, while Earth-sized planets go unnoticed. And if you’ll look at this graph of exoplanets, you’ll find that of the exoplanets found, most are larger than jupiter, and gaseous.
Sorry about the quality, it’s from a textbook. Red dots are exoplanets, green dots are our planets, the green band at the bottom is terrestrial planets. Most exoplanets fall in the ‘hot jupiter’ and jovian ranges, with very few being terrestrial at all, let alone super earths.
The question they should be asking is “Why don’t we have more gas giants?”
And to be honest, the Guardian is sensationalist and they use the ‘rocky planet = aliens’ trope that people believe in to get more hype for their article. Most science based news sources believe the planet to be a gaseous ice ball.
