Did NASA find Hell? A constantly burning planet
Humanity's first look at a giant planet 50 light-years away is expected in the coming weeks via the James Webb Space Telescope.
A statement issued by the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center website said that the US agency is preparing through the telescope to see hell and things from nightmares.
The planet, called 55 Cancri e, orbits so close to its "sun-like star" that surface conditions can literally be like a continuous inferno that never ends.
The data indicates that the planet (55 Cancri e) is less than 1.5 million miles from its star, which is 1/25 the distance that scorching Mercury is from our sun, NASA says.
"With surface temperatures well above the melting point of typical rock-forming minerals, the day side of the planet is believed to be covered in oceans of lava," the agency reported last week.
“Imagine if the Earth were so much closer to the sun, so close that a year lasted only a few hours, so close that gravity locked one hemisphere in scorching daylight and the other in endless darkness, so close that the oceans,” she says. It boils, the rocks begin to melt, and lava is raining down clouds."
NASA adds: “There is no such thing as a planet in our solar system, and one of the things we hope to discover is whether the planet is tidal-locked, with one side facing the star at all times or if it rotates in a way that would create day and night. ".
Initial observations from NASA's less powerful Spitzer Space Telescope show that something mysterious is happening on 55 Cancri e: the hottest point is not directly facing the planet's star.
One theory is that the planet has a "dynamic atmosphere that moves heat around it," says NASA, and another idea is that the planet rotates to create day and night, but with horrific results.
In this scenario, the surface would heat up and melt until it evaporated during the day, forming an extremely thin atmosphere that the James Webb Telescope can detect.
"In the evening, the steam cools and condenses to form lava droplets that will rain back to the surface, turning again to a solid state by nightfall."
NASA continues that the James Webb Space Telescope is expected to operate at full capacity in "just weeks", and its first observations are expected to be made during the summer.
Scientists say that the telescope is able to detect the presence of the atmosphere, and will devote its first year to studying the planet (55 Cancri e) and the airless planet (LHS 3844 b), to try to understand "the evolution of rocky planets like Earth," according to NASA.
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