An artist's conception shows the Kepler-10 system, home to two rocky planets. In the foreground is Kepler-10c, a planet that weighs 17 times as much as Earth and is more than twice as large in size.
Exo-planet Kepler 10C has been dubbed the Godzilla of terrestrial worlds. It orbits a star that looks like a long-lost twin to our own sun almost 600 light-years away in the constellation Draco and poses a challenge to
planetary astronomy:
Seventeen times more massive than Earth, a planet of that magnitude should not exist as a solid celestial body -- or so scientists previously thought. They believed that a massive planet like Kepler-10c would be composed of hydrogen and gas, much like Jupiter and other so-called "gas giants."
"Kepler-10c is a big problem for the theory," Sasselov told Discovery News. "It’s nice that we have a solid piece of evidence and measurements for it because that gives motivations to the theorists to improve the theory."
Well, 10c orbits about twice as close to its star than Mercury does to ours, which could help explain why it isn't a gas giant. Beyond that we can only speculate. Some of us old-school hard sci-fi fans might feel better if it were called
Mesklin. Or maybe
Starship Troopers would be more accurate: maybe it's an ugly planet, a
bug planet!