Yahoo News ‘Shimmering’ planet covered in rubies and sapphires seen orbiting star near us
A mysterious planet rich in rubies and sapphires has been spotted orbiting a star just 21 light years from Earth – and it might be a new class of planet.
The planet, HD219134 b, has a mass five times that of Earth – and don’t have a core of iron, with a ‘year’ that lasts just three days.
Caroline Dorn, astrophysicist at the Institute for Computational Science of the University of Zurich says, ‘Perhaps it shimmers red to blue like rubies and sapphires, because these gemstones are aluminum oxides which are common on the exoplanet.’
During their formation, stars such as the Sun were surrounded by a disk of gas and dust in which planets were born.
Rocky planets like Earth were formed out of the solid bodies left over when the proto-planetary gas disk dispersed. These building blocks condensed out of the nebula gas as the disk cooled.
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But there are also regions close to the star where it is much hotter – and that’s where super-Earths like this planet formed, the researchers believe.
Dorn says, ‘There, many elements are still in the gas phase and the planetary building blocks have a completely different composition.
‘This is why such planets cannot, for example, have a magnetic field like the Earth.’
The team believe there may be a whole new exotic class of super-Earths formed from high-temperature condensates.
Dorn says, ‘In our calculations we found that these planets have 10-20% lower densities than the Earth. We looked at different scenarios to explain the observed densities.
‘So, we have found three candidates that belong to a new class of super-Earths with this exotic composition.’
