NEWS: An Entire New Planet Discovered That Is Being Called ‘Mega-Earth’

NASA’s Kepler Telescope has discovered a planet with the same rocky make-up as Earth, just 17 times as big.

The Washington Post reports that the planet now known as Kepler-10c is the largest rocky planet ever found and has refuted the scientific assumption that any planet with this much hydrogen gas would turn into a gas giant like Jupiter or Saturn.

Kepler-10c is so big that it has its own category, “Mega-Earth,” as the largest a “Super-Earth” could be is 10 times the size of our planet.

The amount of places where extraterrestrial life could be found has increased dramatically now that it’s been proven that a planet this big can maintain a dense surface.

Kepler-10c orbits a star 560 light-years away every 45 days, has a diameter 2.3 times that of Earth and a surface gravity twice as powerful as our planet’s.

It’s too close to its star to harbor any life, however, and its rock is dense and roasted over.

Dimitar Sasselov, a professor of astronomy at Harvard, told the Post,

"It’s still rock, but it’s rock that’s twice as dense as the rock we’re used to."

The Kepler Space Telescope has found three rocky planets orbiting a star from a distance capable of sustaining water at the surface and possibly life.

The small stars they orbit are known as “M-dwarfs,” a very common type of star that accounts for about seven out of every 10 stars in our galaxy.

The planets are technically close enough to sustain life, but the wind their stars emit is strong enough to destroy any sort of atmosphere that may have been there.

Mars once had a magnetic field similar to Earth’s, but the sun’s wind stripped it away.

The research that led to the discovery of Kepler-10c tells us that the only planets we should be exploring for extraterrestrial life are those that orbit stars similar to our sun!