A planet previously announced by NASA in 2011 now has astronomers referring to it as the ‘Godzilla of Earths’.
Called Kepler-10c its mass is about 17 times greater than Earth’s. Kepler-10c is a bit of a mystery to experts as they had always believed any planet that huge would pull so much hydrogen on to itself that it would bear similar resembles to either Jupiter or Neptune, but instead this one appears to be rocky and may have a thin atmosphere.
Dimitas Sasselov with Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics remarked “ this is the Godzilla of Earths”, but unlike the movie monster Kepler-10c has positive implications for life.
Finding Kepler-10c tells us that rocky planes could form much earlier than we thought and if you can make rocks you can make life!
Kepler-10c orbits around its parent star once every 45 days.
