Until now we thought we knew what was the largest size that a rocky planet could reach ; But of course, our understanding of the formation of the planets is based on what we are observing and discovering directly thanks to better astronomical instruments. New data from NASA’s Kepler ‘planet hunter’ telescope have made it possible to find the largest known entirely rocky planet.
The planet in question, which is located more than 500 light years away from our planet , in the constellation of Aries, has been baptized as BD + 20594b and its size does not go unnoticed: it is about 16 times more massive than Earth ( the mass of Neptune is 17 times that of the Earth, for example) but, unlike this, the new neighbor is composed entirely of rock and has half the diameter of the aforementioned gas giant.
Because its parent star is exceptionally bright, astronomers were able to observe it in detail. According to experts, BD + 20594b has a density of approximately 8 grams per cubic centimeter , data that far exceeds the known planets in our solar system, which shows that the range of planets is wider than we thought and evidencing, once again, the value of the Kepler mission as a laboratory to test our theories of planet formation.
The discovery has been published on arXiv.org by astrophysicist Néstor Espinoza and other scientists from the Universidad Católica de Chile in Santiago.
