Wednesday, February 22, 2012

Planet Steampunk

This is very cool. Well, actually, it’s really hot.

Using NASA’s famed Hubble Space Telescope, scientists have determined that an alien world located just 40 light years from Earth is unlike anything previously found before: A world composed primarily of steam.

The planet, known officially under the unflattering moniker GJ 1214b, “is like no planet we know of,” said Zachory Berta a researcher at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, in a release announcing the discovery of the planet’s strange composition, adding: “A huge fraction of its mass is made up of water.”

It’s not the heat, it’s the humidity.