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K2-141b: The world of eternal fire and eternal night
Did you know there’s a planet that might have oceans of lava? It’s called K2-141b, located about 200 light-years from Earth, and it orbits so close to its star that it completes a full lap in under 7 hours. Its day side reaches 3,000°C, hot enough to melt the rock on its surface. Since it always shows the same face to its star, one side lives in eternal fire while the other sits in freezing darkness at -200°C. Scientists believe the extreme heat vaporizes rock and creates a kind of mineral atmosphere, which drifts toward the cold side, condenses… and falls back down as rain. But rock rain, not water.…
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Something hit Earth from the other side of the galaxy
Fun fact: In December 2004, space telescopes detected something that briefly left them baffled: a gamma-ray flare so bright that, for a fraction of a second, it saturated the sensors of several satellites designed to watch the sky. The source was SGR 1806−20, a magnetar — a neutron star with the most powerful magnetic field known in the universe — located about 50,000 light-years away, on the other side of the galaxy. What’s most astonishing isn’t just that it was the brightest gamma-ray flare ever recorded, outshining even the most violent solar flares, but that its energy traveled that entire distance and still hit Earth hard enough to disturb the…
