Hello, World!

What do CoRoT-7b and our own Earth have in common?

They're both what astronomers call rocky planets as opposed to gas giants like Jupiter, and CoRoT-7b actually circles another star, some 500 light-years from us. Telescopes found the world back in February and density measurements confirmed it's a solid world instead of a ball of hot gas (insert your favorite politician joke here).

Solidity may be the only thing we have in common with CoRoT-7b, though. As the story mentions, it's only 1.6 million miles from its star, 23 times closer than Mercury is to our sun. At that distance, it's become tidally locked. This means the gravity of its star has affected the planet's rotational speed so that it matches up with its oribital speed in such a way that only one side faces its sun. Our moon, for reference, is tidally locked with the Earth.

Since one side always faces a sun that's pretty much just across the street in terms of astronomical distances, that side is probably hot enough to be molten. All you entrepreneurs might want to start stocking up on sunscreen to sell to the CoRoT-7b-ians. The other side, even though it's also very close to the sun, is probably very very cold, since it never gets any sunlight at all. Other entrepreneurs might consider naming a new insulation product after CoRoT-7b. Which actually kind of sounds like some sort of chemical already.

CoRoT-7b isn't the planet closest to its sun -- that honor belongs to a world called SWEEPS-10, which is so close and moves so fast that its year is only 10 hours long. That's barely one-thousandth as long as our year -- if we talked to someone who lived there and complained about a meeting that felt like it went on for weeks, they would shrug and wonder what the problem was.