Science
Related: About this forum'Godzilla of Earths' identified
There is a new class of planet out there that astronomers are calling the "mega-Earth".
It is an object with a hard surface like our own world but much, much bigger.
The necessity for the new designation follows the discovery of a planet which has a mass some 17 times that of Earth.
Known as Kepler-10c, it orbits a star about 560 light-years away. Scientists described its properties at an American Astronomical Society meeting in Boston.
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-27669572
Erose999
(5,624 posts)that the higher the gravity the planet has, the larger and more radioactive its magnetosphere is. Jupiter's magnetosphere, for example, would be hazardous to space travelling humans.
wyldwolf
(43,867 posts)Twice the diameter. So r is doubled. Works out to be a bit more than 4x Earth's gravity at the surface. Still not pleasant.
Magnetic field? Depends on rotation and whether the core's liquid. Since it's 11 billion year's old, that rather depends on the amount of radioactive isotopes present in the core.
Jupiter's got a strong magnetic field (which by itself probably wouldn't kill) because of the metallic hydrogen core and its fast rotation.
MillennialDem
(2,367 posts)eppur_se_muova
(36,246 posts)Since the air pressure applies equally to every part of your body, you don't experience any pressure difference, so no force due just to the atmosphere. If your body was slowly adapted to high pressure in a pressure chamber, or by slowly diving deeper in the ocean, you could live and function at that pressure pretty normally -- as some underwater habitat dwellers have done for weeks and months at a time.
To creatures from a planet with a thin atmosphere, our atmosphere would seem "crushing" -- it's a relative term.
Erose999
(5,624 posts)sleeping in a hyperbaric chamber. Here I thought all these celebrities like Michael Jackson and Liz Taylor and Madonna were trying to prevent aging by "allegedly" using hyperbaric chambers, but they were really preparing for life on extraterrestrial planets.