Loaded Couch Potatoes

The European space telescope COROT has discovered an astronomical first: a planet outside of our solar system with a rocky surface.  All previous planets discovered by space telescopes have either been gas giants or too distant for astronomers to ascertain surface details.

The planet orbits a star over four hundred light years distant from Earth, and has been named COROT-7b.

COROT-7b orbits its sun so closely that Artie Haztes, director of the Thuringer Observatory and co-disoverer of the planet, says that some colleagues are calling it “the lava planet” due to the resultant surface temperature, which is somewhere in the vicinty of 3600° Fahrenheit.

The Hubble Space Telescope has captured what some believe to be an image of the surface of the planet:

Okay, well, maybe not.

The planet orbits its star quite rapidly, completing an orbit once every twenty hours.  This orbit is so short because of the fact that the planet lies some twenty-three times closer to the star than our solar system’s inmost planet, Mercury, does to the sun. 

This makes the chances of life existing on the planet quite small, but the discovery of the planet is still seen as being significant to the search for extraterrestrial life, as it is generally assumed that most nascent life will require some sort of surface to evolve upon.

Now, for the first time, we have proof that such surfaces exist elsewhere in our galaxy.

So somewhere, them lightsabers might a-duellin’ yet.