First light from a super-Earth spotted
First light from a super-Earth spotted
Tue May 8th, 2012
Jennifer Chu, MIT News Office
“This planet is so close to the star that it’s very strongly irradiated,” says co-author on the current Astrophysical Journal Letters article about 55 Cancri e, Brice-Olivier Demory, a postdoc in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences. “It’s like in the movie ‘Avatar,’ where Pandora orbits the gas giant Polyphemus. Seeing Polyphemus from Pandora gives an idea of how big the star would look from 55 Cancri e.”