Mega Earth
A giant rocky planet, seventeen times the size of Earth, has been discovered.
Planets are supposed to come in two classes. You have the small, rocky ones like the Earth, Mars and Venus, and gas giants like Jupiter, Saturn and Neptune. Theories of planet formation suggest that you can't have anything in between. But a new discovery suggests it's time to throw out the theories. Dr. Xavier Dumusque of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and his colleagues have discovered a rocky planet that is 17 times the mass of the Earth - much larger than any other rocky planet, and much larger than theory suggests should exist. It's being called a "Mega-Earth" and suggests planetary diversity is much larger than we might have thought.
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