immense amounts of volcanic activity may be triggering idle , fiery fluctuations in temperature on a super - Earth call 55 Cancri e. These rapid change include temperature swing of over a thousand degrees . Thework , useable online atarXiv , is the first meter uranologist have observed variations in the air of a rocky planet outside of the solar system .
55 Cancri e is twice the size of Earth , and eight times the flock . It revolve a sun - like star with four other exoplanets 40 light - years away in the constellation Cancer . It ’s so close to its host star , a year lasts just 18 minute , and because the planet is tidally interlace , it does n’t splay the way Earth does – giving it a lasting “ sidereal day ” side and a “ night ” side .
Using NASA ’s Spitzer Space Telescope , Cambridge ’s Brice - Olivier Demoryand colleagues observe a triple modification in temperature over the path of just two years . On the hot “ day ” side of the planet , the temperature jive between 1,000 and 2,700 degrees Celsius .
“ This is the first prison term we ’ve seen such drastic change in lightness emitted from an exoplanet , which is particularly remarkable for a super Earth,”Cambridge ’s Nikku Madhusudhansays in anews release . “ No signature of thermal emission or surface bodily function has ever been detected for any other super Earth to date . ”
The causes of these turbulent temperature changes are still being investigate , though the team suspect they ’re due to massive amounts of volcanic bodily process on the airfoil , which may be partially molten . “ We saw a 300 percent alteration in the signal coming from this major planet , which is the first prison term we ’ve assure such a huge layer of unevenness in an exoplanet,”Demory explains . “ While we ca n’t be exclusively certain , we recall a potential explanation for this variability is expectant - scale Earth’s surface activity , maybe volcanism , on the surface is spew out monumental volume of petrol and debris , which sometimes blanket the thermal emanation from the planet so it is not seen from Earth . ” ( The rates of volcanic activity mayeven be higher than Jupiter ’s Io . )
old watching of 55 Cancri atomic number 99 indicated a high abundance of C , suggest that the satellite was composed of diamond . “ But now we ’re finding that those measurements are changing in clip . The planet could still be atomic number 6 rich , but now we ’re not so sure – earlier studies of this planet have even suggested that it could be a piss world,”Madhusudhan adds . “ The present variability is something we ’ve never seen anywhere else , so there ’s no racy conventional account . But that ’s the playfulness in science . ”
