Mega Earth Is Awesome

I am guilty of using the word ‘awesome’ too frequently. If I had my way, it would never go extinct, such as the nostalgic ‘radical,’ ‘tubular’ and ‘groovy’ sentiments of our ‘righteous’ evolving lexicon have. However, with great awesomeness comes great responsibility. If asked, “How was your BLT?” I might reply, half-daftly, “It was awesome,” and then recall that Maya Angelou was also awesome, as are the bunnies hopping around in my backyard and the beaches of Stone Harbor and Avalon. It’s an arguably futile exercise in self-discovery to ponder such things, but when something as monumental as a Mega Earth enters my scope of knowledge, the word I want to use so badly to describe it seems trite.
Recently discovered by NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope, Mega Earth (Kepler-10c) orbits a sun-like star 560 light-years away in the constellation Draco. It is a planet that weighs 17 times as much as our own Earth, is 2.3 times as large and has a dense composition of mainly rocks and other solids. Dimitar Sasselov, director of the Harvard Origins of Life Initiative at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) called it “the Godzilla of Earths! But unlike the movie monster, Kepler-10c has positive implications for life.”
Sasselov’s observation may be pure optimism, though. The chance of harboring life on this particular planet seems outlandish. Mega Earth is so close to its parent star – rotating around it in a mere 45 days – that its surface is likely much too hot to walk around on, assuming you were a life-form that could withstand the immense gravity (triple our own) constantly weighing you down. Bummer. But it is the unlikely existence of Kepler-10c that has astronomers, the scientific community and yours truly gasping in awe.
Kepler-10c was actually discovered in 2011, along with its sister exoplanet, Kepler-10b (which rotates the same sun-like star in a mere 20 hours, making it likely to be a horrifying “lava planet”). But it wasn’t until last week when astronomers divulged the information that this Kepler-10c is much more than they originally surmised. It was assumed, prior to this discovery, that any planet exceeding 10 times the size of our own would be a gaseous, uninhabitable giant like Jupiter or Neptune, ensconced in hydrogen. But Mega Earth destroys this assumption, as it is indeed a rocky world.
Why does any of this matter? The answer undoubtedly resides in future generations. With each new discovery out there in the final frontier, we come closer to finding living organisms on other worlds and realizing that we likely are not alone in this strange, unprecedented universe; understanding our own origins and the origins of the infinite; and perhaps harnessing untapped, galactic real estate. It may sound like science fiction but it doesn’t have to be.
Admittedly, I’ve been concurrently enjoying Neil deGrasse Tyson’s rebooted television series Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey and re-reading Douglas Adams’ ridiculously entertaining The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series. While the former is a scientific account of the history of everything and the latter is a fictional, farcical romp through space (beginning with the destruction of Earth to make way for an inter-galactic highway!), these two stories, though vastly different in composition and value do hold at least one similarity: they are both fascinating, thought-provoking entities to experience. Throw a Mega Earth into the mix and I’ve got my own orchestra of otherworldly meditations playing stargazing symphonies in my head.
It’s pretty mind blowing to think about, isn’t it – life outside our realm of understanding and planets sort of like ours but bigger … much, much bigger? Mega Earth was formed approximately 3 billion years after the Big Bang, the known creation of the universe. Prior to the discovery of Kepler-10c, it was believed that the universe contained only hydrogen and helium in its early stages (at the least, those first 3 billion years). The process necessary to form the stuff that rocky planets mainly consist of, namely silicon and iron, should have taken much longer. And yet, somehow Kepler-10c beat the odds. Think about the implications this has on the rest of the uncharted universe! Only time will tell what else is out there.
“Finding Kepler-10c tells us that rocky planets could form much earlier than we thought,” Sasselov said. “And if you can make rocks, you can make life.”
I’m not quite sure how rock formations correlate with life formations. Sasselov’s enthusiasm may have overstepped the science here and clouded his point. Were he a lesser-educated man, Sasselov might have phrased his excitement differently: “Finding Kepler-10c tells us that rocky planets could form much earlier than we thought. And that is rad. If you can make rocks, life surely can’t be far behind. Mega Earth is awesome.”
Bryon Cahill has a Twitter account @shakabry where he creates and destroys worlds in 140 characters or less.