Gliese 486b
The study of planets outside of the solar system is still in its infancy. The first exoplanet wasn’t officially recorded until 1992, and there are still less than five thousand confirmed exoplanets in space. That’s despite various estimates claiming that there are many billions of them still to be discovered in the universe. Even so, every so often we find one that particularly piques our interest… and that’s exactly what Gliese 486b has done! super-Earth A super-Earth is an exoplanet with a mass up to ten times greater than our Earth’s. But, really, that’s all. Contrary to common misinterpretation, a super-Earth isn’t automatically similar to our own world in any other way. For example, it isn’t necessarily habitable, and it doesn’t necessarily have Earth-like environments . Sometimes, a super-Earth is also Earth-like, but most of the time it isn’t. And that’s true of Gliese 486b , an exoplanet recently discovered by a team of scientists work...