The weekly newsletter for Fed2 by ibgames

EARTHDATE: October 4, 2009

Official News page 9


REAL LIFE NEWS: BEWARE FALLING ROCKS

by Hazed

One of the stock planets in Fed DataSpace is the rocky world, but that concept has a whole new meaning after reading reports of a new exoplanet discovered recently. Named COROT-7b, if you lived there you would need a heavy duty umbrella, because it doesn't rain water - it rains rocks!

Researchers at Washington University in St Louis have been running models of the planet which was discovered back in February. Their conclusion is that the atmosphere "is made up of the ingredients of rocks and when a front moves in, pebbles condense out of the air and rain into lakes of molten lava below."

Exoplanets are planets outside our solar system, and thanks to the power of modern space telescopes we are now finding them at an amazing rate. Most are gas supergiants like Jupiter, but a few Earth-like planets have been discovered. COROT-7b is not one of those, however - apart from the strange showers of pebbles, it is so close to its sun that its orbit is more like that of our Moon around the Earth. One face always points towards the sun, and on that side it is thought that temperatures reach 4220 degrees Fahrenheit. No wonder the rocks are molten - at that heat they just vaporize and the elements that make up the rocks rise into the air as gasses... then as they rise higher the atmosphere gets cooler, and the rocks form into solid lumps again and fall back to the ground.

That should give you an idea for a wacky planet for Fed DataSpace!

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