Temperature map of Super Earth reveals lava world

London: Using data from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, an international team of astronomers that also includes an Indian-origin scientist has for the first time obtained the most detailed “fingerprint” of a super-Earth planet -- a rocky planet nearly two times as big as ours.

The efforts led to the first temperature map that reveals extreme temperature swings from one side of the “55 Cancri e” planet to the other and hints that a possible reason for this is the presence of lava flows. "We have entered a new era of atmospheric remote sensing of rocky exoplanets," said study co-author Nikku Madhusudhan from the institute of astronomy at the University of Cambridge.

“It is incredible that we are now able to measure the large scale temperature distribution on the surface of a rocky exoplanet,” he added. According to the team led by Cambridge, conditions on the hot side of the planet are so extreme that it may have caused the atmosphere to evaporate, with the result that conditions on the two sides of the planet vary widely.

Temperatures on the hot side can reach 2500 degrees Celsius while temperatures on the cool side are around 1100 degree Celsius. “55 Cancri e” orbits a sun-like star located 40 light years away in the Cancer constellation. It is a 'super Earth' - a rocky exoplanet about twice the size and eight times the mass of Earth and orbits its parent star so closely that a year lasts just 18 hours.

The planet is also tidally locked, meaning that it always shows the same face to its parent star, similar to the Moon, so there is a permanent “day” side and a “night” side. Since it is among the nearest super Earths whose composition can be studied, 55 Cancri e is among the best candidates for detailed observations of surface and atmospheric conditions on rocky exoplanets.