The estimated surface temperature of this smoldering planet, at more than 800 degrees Fahrenheit (700 degrees Kelvin), would be hot enough to melt the zinc in a penny. Kepler-37b orbits every 13 days at less than one-third Mercury’s distance from the sun. All three planets orbit the star at less than the distance Mercury is to the sun, suggesting they are very hot, inhospitable worlds. Kepler-37’s host star belongs to the same class as our sun, although it is slightly cooler and smaller. “The fact we’ve discovered tiny Kepler-37b suggests such little planets are common, and more planetary wonders await as we continue to gather and analyze additional data.” “Even Kepler can only detect such a tiny world around the brightest stars it observes,” said Jack Lissauer, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif. As technologies have advanced, smaller and smaller planets have been found, and Kepler has shown that even Earth-size exoplanets are common. The first exoplanets found to orbit a normal star were giants. Kepler-37d, the farther planet, is twice the size of Earth. Kepler-37c, the closer neighboring planet, is slightly smaller than Venus, measuring almost three-quarters the size of Earth. The tiny planet almost certainly is rocky in composition.
However, while the star in Kepler-37 may be similar to our sun, the system appears quite unlike the solar system in which we live.Īstronomers think Kepler-37b does not have an atmosphere and cannot support life as we know it. The moon-size planet and its two companion planets were found by scientists with NASA’s Kepler mission, which is designed to find Earth-sized planets in or near the “habitable zone,” the region in a planetary system where liquid water might exist on the surface of an orbiting planet.
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