Jonathan Frahm
Staff Writer
Astronomers have recently found a massive, rocky planet that weighs in at 17 times the size of Earth and is more than twice its overall size.
The discovery of the planet, currently known as Kepler-10c or “the Godzilla of Earths,” has astronomers totally dumbfounded as it was previously not thought that a planet completely made of rock could form. Of the discovery, Xavier Dumusque of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) said, “We were very surprised when we realized what we found.”
Dumusque was the astronomer who led Kelper-10c’s analysis by incorporating data first collected by NASA’s Kepler space telescope, hence the planet’s apropos naming. After the initial analyzing, his team used the HARPS-North instrument on the Canary Islands to carry out any and all subsequent analyzes.
This had eventually lead to the mass measurement which shook the world of astronomy, which Natalie Batalha, a Kepler mission scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center, summed up best: “Just when you think you’ve got it figured all out, nature gives you a huge surprise – in this case, literally. Isn’t science marvelous?”
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