Last Updated on November 17, 2017
to its star than Earth, so the star appears almost 360 times larger than the sun does in our sky.
The planet’s surface experiences extreme heating that may reach 3,600 degrees Fahrenheit on the daylight side. CoRoT-7b’s size (70 percent larger than Earth) and mass (4.8 times Earth’s) indicate that the world is probably made of rocky materials.
But with such a high dayside temperature, any rocky surface facing the star must be molten, and the planet cannot retain anything more than a tenuous atmosphere, even one of vaporized rock,” said Brian Jackson at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. Solar heating may have already cooked off several Earth masses of material from CoRoT-7b.
CoRoT-7b takes just 20.4 hours to circle its sun-like star, located 480 light-years away in the constellation Monoceros.