GJ 436b - NASAThere’s been quite a bit about exo-planets in the news today.  It’s almost as though the scientific community fears their funding is about to be cut off without some solid results, and they’re scrambling to get the word out.

Of course that’s not what’s happening now … but it’s interesting how so much space-related news is coming out lately.

All that aside, it seems that a planet that defies conventional design has been found to be in the galactic neighbourhood.  Only 33 light-years away (6 weeks journey at Warp 5 if you’re planning a visit), a planet designated GJ 436b has been found to orbit quickly around a relatively cool red-dwarf star.  This odd planet, the size of Neptune, is made of (what appears to be) mostly hot, solid water.  The mean temperature of the planet is 250 degrees Celcius, but the gravitational pull of the world is so strong that the water vapor is held in a solid state.

Essentially, the water is scalding hot due to the planet’s proximity to its star, but frozen due to the mass of the world.  As pressure rises, so does the boiling point of liquid.

For those that pay attention to exo-planets, you might recall that GJ 436b was discussed in The Astrophysical Journal back on June 20th, 2005 in a paper titled “Toward a Deterministic Model of Planetary Formation. III. Mass Distribution of Short-Period Planets Around Stars of Various Masses”.  The discovery of this world, and others like it, posed a challenge to the theories of planet formation.  You can download the PDF from SFSU here.  Somehow, though, I doubt very many people even knew about this star system before today, and will likely forget about it before too long.

What’s interesting is that researchers believe that this planet may be blanketed by hydrogen.  While these conditions are hardly conclusive to the existence of life, there are many species of heat-loving organisms that thrive from the searing heat put out by the Earth’s hydrothermal vents.

Perhaps in a hundred years or so we’ll be able to send a remote probe to this world in some faster-than-light vessel to explore the ocean depths.  It would certainly be a sight to behold.