Astronomers May Have Found Volcanoes 40 Light-Years From Earth
Wild temperature swings on a distant exoplanet called 55 Cancri e could be evidence of gigantic eruptions on a super-Earth.
Of all the recent discoveries reported of late from worlds outside our solar system, a new find may be the most extraordinary yet: A world known as 55 Cancri e, just 40 light-years from Earth, might be volcanically active.
“It’s super exciting,” says Cambridge University astrophysicist Nikku Madhusudhan, co-author of a paper just published online at arXiv.org about the discovery .
When astronomers first began discovering exoplanets back in the 1990s, they figured it would take a bigger, more powerful successor to the Hubble to study them in any detail. They were wrong. Even with the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope still several years in the future, exoplanet experts have managed to probe the atmospheres of
