Interesting planet, but not on my tourism itinerary

What a dramatic planet!

Astronomers have found a weird planet orbiting a very Sun-like star. Called K2-360b, the planet is 1.6 times Earth’s diameter, but 7.7 times its mass. That makes it dense: with an average density of 11 grams per cubic centimeter, it’s twice as dense as Earth! That’s literally as dense as lead. That mass and size makes its surface gravity three times Earth’s. If you could stand on it (which I would not recommend for many reasons, as you’ll see) you’d weigh three times what you do here.

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Its size makes it a super-Earth, an exoplanet less than about twice Earth’s diameter. Why is it so dense? It likely started off life more like Neptune, with a thick atmosphere, but over time its ridiculously close orbit to the star meant its atmosphere got stripped away by the intense heat. What was left was the rocky-metallic core. The astronomers who did this research ran some models of what the interior is like, it’s likely to be about 50% core, which would explain the density; the cores of such planets are mostly metals. Fun place.

It’s close enough to its star to melt lead and iron, which immediately made me think of the phrase my brother and I would chant while capering about plotting mischief…”Molten metal! Molten metal!”.

I think we identified with Quasimodo in that old movie.