On Nightmare Planet Covered In Boiling Lava, A Year Lasts 8.5 Hours
Kepler 78b Cristina Sanchis Ojeda It's even worse than Florida in the summertime. Kepler 78b is an Earth-sized exoplanet not too far from us--only about 700 light-years away. But don't bother getting your hopes up about settling there, because Kepler 78b is one of the most aggressively unpleasant planets ever discovered (a competitive category, to be sure): its surface is covered with seas of boiling lava and it completes its orbit around its star in a whiplash-inducing 8.5 hours. Researchers at MIT discovered the exoplanet while indulging an experiment: how close can a planet be to its star? Kepler 78b is about 40 times closer to its star than Mercury is to our sun; in fact, Kepler 78b's orbit is only three times larger than the circumference of the star it's orbiting! (Earth's orbit is more than 215 times larger than the circumference of our sun, for comparison.) To find the planet,...