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Source: Reuters
NASA has spotted a tiny, rocky planet about the size of Earth doing a speedy orbit of a star outside our solar system, but its scorching temperatures are too hot for life.
The exoplanet, named Kepler-10b, is the smallest-ever planet discovered outside our solar system.
It is about 1.4 times the size of Earth, with a mass 4.6 times higher and orbits its star more than once a day, much too close for life to survive.
Daytime temperatures exceed 1300 degrees, hot enough to melt iron.
The discovery has been hailed as "among the most profound in human history", the BBC reported, as the planet is considered a "missing link".
"...a bridge between the gas giant planets we've been finding and the Earth itself, a transition... between what we've been finding and what we're hoping to find," pioneer of the hunt for exoplanets Geoffrey Marcy, from the University of California Berkeley said.
It was spotted by the Kepler space telescope, which is designed to look for the signs of far-flung planets.
Kepler relies on the "transiting" technique, which looks for planets that pass between their host star and the Earth.
A tiny fraction of the star's light is blocked periodically, giving a hint that the star has a planet orbiting it.
The radius of the planet correlates to exactly how much light is blocked when it passes.
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