NASA Discovers ‘Mega-Earth’

Scientists announced Monday that NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope has spied an exoplanet that is 17 times larger than Earth. Kepler-10c has been described as a “Mega-Earth” because it is even too gargantuan to fit into the category of “Super-Earths,” which are about 10 times the size of Earth. Scientists didn’t even think an Earth-like planet this big could exist because it was believed that planets 10 times the mass of Earth would hold on to so much hydrogen gas they would become like Saturn or Jupiter. But Kepler-10c is a rocky, dense planet not enveloped in gas. This discovery suggests there is plenty of room for life to exist on other plus-sized planets.