Twenty-one light years away, in the constellation Cassiopeia, a planet by the name of HD219134 b orbits its star with a year that is just three days long. With a mass almost five times that of Earth, it is what is known as a super-Earth. Unlike our planet, however, these super-Earths were formed at high temperatures close to their host star and contain high quantities of calcium, aluminum and their oxides – including sapphire and ruby. HD219134 b is one of three candidates likely to belong to a new, exotic class of exoplanets. These objects are completely different from the majority of Earth-like planets. They have 10 to 20 percent lower densities than Earth. Researchers looked at different scenarios to explain the observed densities. For example, a thick atmosphere could lead to a lower overall density. But two of the exoplanets studied, 55 Cancri e and WASP-47 e, orbit their star so closely that their surface temperature is almost 3,000 degrees and they would have lost this
At its closet on December 16, the comet 46P/Wirtanen — one of the brightest in years — was approximately 11.4 million kilometers from Earth, or 30 times the distance from the Earth to the moon. The ALMA image of comet 46P/Wirtanen zooms-in to very near its nucleus – the solid “dirty snowball” of the comet itself — to image the natural millimeter-wavelength “glow” emitted by molecules of hydrogen cyanide (HCN), a simple organic molecule that forms an ethereal atmosphere around the comet. ALMA, using its remarkable ability to see fine details, was able to detect and image the fine-scale distribution of this particular molecule. The HCN image shows a compact region of gas and an extended, diffuse, and somewhat asymmetrical, pattern in the inner portion of the coma. Due to the extreme proximity of this comet, most of the extended coma is resolved out, so these observations are only sensitive to the innermost regions, in the immediate vicinity of the nucleus. This and previous obse