Weird alien world may be a planetary sauna
Stressful day at the office? Muscles need soothing? A trip to a newly described exoplanet—featuring a thick saunalike steam atmosphere—may be in order. Of course, it would be a long trip for a spa day, given the planet’s location 72 light-years from Earth. Amadeo Castro-González, an astronomer at the Spanish Astrobiology Center who led a recent study describing the steamy planet, says the find could represent a new class of exoplanets, something between a rocky planet and a gas giant. “We propose these are inflated super-Earths,” he says. The planet, TOI-244 b, was initially discovered in 2018 by NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), which looks for the telltale dimming in a star’s light when a planet crosses its face. Castro-González and colleagues used TESS data to estimate that the planet is...