You’ve heard of Superman, Super Mario, and even the Super Bowl. Now, thanks to a group of scientists from around the world, get ready to meet a Super Earth! A recent scientific study talked about an exoplanet with a population density that was so low that it was called the “Super Earth.” The site says that the word “Super Earth” refers to any planet that is bigger than Earth but not as big as a “Mini Neptune.” This shows that Americans will use anything but the metric system to measure.
NASA found the planet, which they named TOI-244 b, as part of a survey. In the near future, thousands more exoplanets and other interesting things in space are expected to be found. The survey that proved the existence of the low-density Super Earth plans to study more than 200,000 of the brightest stars in the known galaxy. At the time this article was written, 331 of these brightest stars had already been confirmed. Using the way light bends, a group of scientists were able to find the exoplanet in the vast, endless vacuum of space. They did this by putting a Chile-based spectrograph called ESPRESSO on the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope.
According to what lead astronomer Amadeo Castro-González said, the Super Earth is about half as big and heavy as the sun. Its radius is 1.52 times that of Earth, and its mass is 2.68 times that of our little blue world. Even though the specs don’t seem to point to the possibility of alien life, this mass seems to indicate that the exoplanet is mostly made of iron and silicates, with a number of highly volatile elements to keep the mass from growing. Scientists haven’t figured out why the Earth-like planet’s density is so low yet, but they plan to keep doing tests in the near future.
Even though there are volatile elements on the surface of Super Earth, or maybe because of them, scientists think that there are a lot of hydrogen molecules on the world. This makes some people think that water could stay on the surface. In recent years, scientists have been constantly thinking about how to find water on other celestial bodies. Recent reports of comets carrying water through the asteroid belt show that H2O can live in certain environments in space.
In the end of their paper, the NASA scientists said that the Super Earth would be a great place to study the atmosphere in the future. They said that the strange properties of the exoplanet and its long atmosphere could hold a lot of information about the rest of the universe. Every day, exciting new finds like this Super Earth bring us closer to the science fiction future that great minds like Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking imagined. Also, the same study that found TOI-244 b is still looking for other exoplanets like TOI-244 b. This could help us learn more about the Super Earth as time goes on.
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