Nearby Magma Covered Planet Discovered By Astronomers

By Rudie Obias | Updated

This article is more than 2 years old

Scientist and researchers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory have discovered a planet just outside of our solar system that’s so hot they think it’s covered completely in boiling magma. The newly-found exoplanet is called UCF-1.01 and not only is it a bad place to have an epic lightsaber battle but it’s the closest planet NASA has discovered that is also smaller than Earth.

NASA astronomer Kevin Stevenson was the one who found this planet with his team using the Spitzer Space Telescope. They were observing a heavenly body in the GJ 436 solar system when they noticed a sporadic dimming, which is a sign that this might be a planet. They published their conclusions in The Astrophysical Journal.

UCF-1.01 is two-thirds the size of Earth. Its distance to its sun is about seven times the length from the Earth to the moon, which is about an Earth day and a half away from making a full rotation (one year) around it. This is why the exoplanet is so hot; it’s very close to its sun. This led scientist to believe that UCF-1.01 is covered in hot magma.

A discovery like this is extremely rare. There are about 1,800 candidate stars, solar stars that may have planets in their orbits, only three have been confirmed to have planets smaller than Earth and of these, only one is smaller than Mustafar UCF-1.01.

It’s also the worst place imaginable to have any sort of manufacturing or communication facilities, and definitely the place where you don’t want to prove to your old Jedi Master that you now don’t need him anymore.