Source: Discover Magazine
The universe, we’re learning, is a crowded place — which made it all the more appropriate that the latest findings about exoplanets were delivered today to a crowded press conference at the American Astronomical Society’s 224th meeting. The most intriguing discoveries provide evidence for two new types of planets that don’t exist in our solar system: gas dwarfs and mega-Earths. These two classes mix up the general rule of thumb that planets are either small and rocky or large and gassy — adding their mirror images, small-gassy and large-rocky combinations respectively.
In so doing, the findings overturn scientists’ assumptions about how a planet’s size predicts its composition, and thus about where we might find habitable worlds.
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