Unless you’re a climber or a geologist, rocks may not rank high on most people’s list of “things I’m looking for in a place to live.” But when you’re talking planets to live on, rocks are everything.
Earth is a rocky planet. Mars, Venus and Mercury, likewise. And if mankind is ever going to set foot on a planet circling another star, there will need to be something to set foot on. Well, rocksВ — specifically a rocky planetВ — are the best bet.
That’s why Wednesday’s announcement of the discovery earlier this year of Corot-7b is such a big deal. It’s the first rocky extrasolar planet discovered by astronomers, and orbits the star Corot, which is 500 light years away in the constellation Monoceros (the Unicorn).
Corot-7b is a hot rock, too. In fact, an article by AP writer Seth Borenstein notes the planet is so close to its star that the surface temperature is some 3,600 degrees Fahrenheit. It’s also fast, to the tune of 466,000 mph, orbiting its sun in 20 hours. That makes Mercury, our solar system’s speedster with an 88-day orbit, a tortoise by comparison.
But setting aside the hostile environment, Borenstein reports that this planet is “a major discovery in the field of trying to find life elsewhere in the universe,” according to Alan Boss of the Carnegie Institution, who wasn’t involved in the discovery.
An extrasolar planet is any planet that is discovered orbiting a start other than our Sun. The first such planet discovered, according to The Extrasolar Planets Encyclopedia, came in 1989. Its name is hardly poeticВ — HD114762b — but maybe you can call it “b” for short since the rest of that alphanumeric code is the identity of the star it circles. That’s astronomy for you, eh? Fortunately, its constellation has a lyrical name and an interesting association: Coma Berenices, or Berenice’s Hair.
According to Wikipedia, “Coma Berenices is one of the few constellations to owe its name to an historical figure, in this case Queen Berenice II of Egypt, wife of Ptolemy III Euergetes (fl. 246 BC–221 BC), the king under whom Alexandria became an important cultural center.” The article also attributes the “promotion” of Coma Berenices to a constellation to Tycho Brahe, an astronomer of the 16th and 17th centuries who also had a really fun idea about our solar system that, like so many other early theories, were undone by modern science.