Imagine a planet hurtling through space at a dizzying 100,000 kilometers per hour – that's Kepler-10b for you, racing around its star faster than any object in our solar system. This "super-Earth" , discovered in 2011 , wasn't just the first confirmed rocky exoplanet – it was a window into a bizarre and captivating world unlike anything we've ever seen. Supersized and Superheated: A Day That Lasts 20 Hours With a radius 1.4 times larger than Earth , Kepler-10b boasts a hefty 2.5 times the volume of our home planet. But unlike Earth's comfortable 24-hour day, a single day on Kepler-10b whizzes by in a mere 20 hours . That's because it orbits its star, Kepler-10, at an scorching distance of 0.016 AU , a staggering 20 times closer than Mercury is to our Sun. The result? A surface temperature exceeding a mind-blowing 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit (1,400 degrees Celsius) – hot enough to melt granite and vaporize most metals! This unrelenting heat would vaporiz...
“The universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can't imagine”