Based on a new discovery spotted with NASA's Kepler telescope, scientists have determined there is a new class of planets in outer space called "mega-Earths."
According to BBC News, the new planet, known as Kepler-10c, has a hard surface like Earth and has a mass about 17 times that of our planet. Kepler-10c orbits a star about 560 light years away.
Research team leader Xavier Dumusque, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA), said the team was "very surprised when we realized what we had found."
"This is the Godzilla of Earths!" the CfA's Dimitar Sasselov, the director of the Harvard Origins of Life Initiative, said in a press release. "But unlike the movie monster, Kepler-10c has positive implications for life.
"Finding Kepler-10c tells us that rocky planets could form much earlier than we thought. And if you can make rocks, you can make life."
Kepler has identified hundreds of planets and thousands of celestial bodies that could be planets, the Washington Post reported. The telescope has since been decommissioned after one of its rotating wheels broke, but scientists are reviewing the wealth of data it has accumulated over the years.
"Kepler-10c didn't lose its atmosphere over time. It's massive enough to have held onto one if it ever had it," Dumusque said in the release. "It must have formed the way we see it now."
Ofer Cohen, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said it is another matter entirely for the "space weather" to support life. Even if an exoplanet resembles Earth entirely, it needs a habitable atmosphere.
"These planets don't reside in a vacuum, they reside in a medium that has a continuous flow of particles, mostly protons, that are emitted by the star," Cohen told the Post. "Maybe we should not focus on M-dwarfs, even though those are so common. Maybe we should focus on the more sun-like stars."
