Godzilla earths

[oldpink]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-27669572

on BBC news

 

[ronin]

Read this elsewhere, why is everything a Super/Mega Earth ? :confused:

At 17 times the Earths mass it is not an Earth is any real way.

Can you imaging going to a bowling competition with a bowling ball 17x bigger then the normal ones and trying to argue that it qualifies? :grin: :grin:

Mind you I suspect someone somwhere has.

[SlyReaper]

Saw this last night. Hard to imagine how such a beastie could form. Perhaps via the collision of several smaller planets?

[stash_old]

Thats were Superman comes from thats why he can stop a speeding train and leap a biulding   - well you would if you came from there and then lived here . I presume from its mass the  gravity would be crushing things some what. Still if life exists around "old Smokies" then who knows what might exist there 

[Laurie61]

It's an interesting article and it amazes me that the technology is capable of finding planets around stars 560 light-years away but I can't understand why you would go away and re write the text books, on star system formation, with a test sample of 1. Could this planet have been captured by this system billions of years after its own formation ? There also seems to be a desire to call everything Earth like, although it might make for good sound bites at a press conferences it surely cannot be good science.      

[SlyReaper]

It's an interesting article and it amazes me that the technology is capable of finding planets around stars 560 light-years away but I can't understand why you would go away and re write the text books, on star system formation, with a test sample of 1. Could this planet have been captured by this system billions of years after its own formation ? There also seems to be a desire to call everything Earth like, although it might make for good sound bites at a press conferences it surely cannot be good science.      

I don't blame them.  Scientists are almost always catastrophically underfunded (unless you're working for a cosmetics company or something), so anything they can do to attract a few more dollars to let them continue their research, the temptation must be quite strong.