“We were very surprised when we realized what we had found,” said astronomer Xavier Dumusque of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
“This is the Godzilla of Earths!” said Dimitar Sasselov from CfA. “But unlike the movie monster, Kepler-10c has positive implications for life.”
The newfound mega-Earth, Kepler-10c, circles a Sun-like star once every 45 days. It is located about 560 light-years from Earth in the constellation Draco. The system also hosts a 3-Earth-mass “lava world,” Kepler-10b, in a remarkably fast 20-hour orbit.
NASA’s Kepler spacecraft originally spotted Kepler-10c. Kepler finds planets using the transit method, looking for a star that dims when a planet passes in front of it. By measuring the amount of dimming, astronomers can calculate the planet’s physical size or diameter. However, Kepler can’t tell whether a planet is rocky or gassy.
Kepler-10c was known to have a diameter of about 18,000 miles (29,000 kilometers), 2.3 times as large as Earth. This suggested it fell into a category of planets known as mini-Neptunes, which have thick gaseous envelopes.
The team used the HARPS-North instrument on the Telescopio Nazionale Galileo (TNG) in the Canary Islands to measure the mass of Kepler-10c. They found that it weighed 17 times as much as Earth — far more than expected. This showed that Kepler-10c must have a dense composition of rocks and other solids.
“Kepler-10c didn’t lose its atmosphere over time. It’s massive enough to have held onto one if it ever had it,” said Dumusque. “It must have formed the way we see it now.”
Planet formation theories have a difficult time explaining how such a large rocky world could develop. However, a new observational study suggests that it is not alone.
Also presenting at AAS, Lars A. Buchhave from CfA found a correlation between the period of a planet — how long it takes to orbit its star — and the size at which a planet transitions from rocky to gaseous. This suggests that more mega-Earths will be found as planet hunters extend their data to longer-period orbits.
The discovery that Kepler-10c is a mega-Earth also has profound implications for the history of the universe and the possibility of life. The Kepler-10 system is about 11 billion years old, which means it formed less than 3 billion years after the Big Bang.
The early universe contained only hydrogen and helium. Heavier elements needed to make rocky planets, like silicon and iron, had to be created in the first generations of stars. When those stars exploded, they scattered these crucial ingredients through space, which then could be incorporated into later generations of stars and planets.
This process should have taken billions of years. However, Kepler-10c shows that the universe was able to form such huge rocks even during the time when heavy elements were scarce.
“Finding Kepler-10c tells us that rocky planets could form much earlier than we thought. And if you can make rocks, you can make life,” said Sasselov.
This research implies that astronomers shouldn’t rule out old stars when they search for Earth-like planets. And if old stars can host rocky Earths too, then we have a better chance of locating potentially habitable worlds in our cosmic neighborhood.
