Sentences with phrase «rocky core surrounded»

«This planet has the interior structure of a hybrid super - Earth / Neptune, with a rocky core surrounded by a significant amount of water compressed into solid form at high pressures and temperatures.»

They modelled more complex bodies than have been tried before: rather than just a homogeneous ball, they included more realistic objects with a hard, rocky core surrounded by an icy mantle.

Not exact matches

On the outside they are covered by a thick layer of ice, and underneath this there is an ocean surrounding a rocky core.

Lagrange says the finding is consistent with a planet formation model known as core accretion in which the planet starts out as a rocky core that gravitationally acquires more matter from the surrounding swarm of dust and gas.

In the prevailing theory of planet formation, called core accretion, dust grains stick together to form rocky worlds, and some of these rocky bodies then grow massive enough to attract surrounding gas, becoming gas giants like Jupiter.

Combined with its mass of 8.57 Earths, that size suggests the planet has a dense rocky core, surrounded by a 3000 - kilometre - thick envelope of nearly pure water.

The ocean is several tens of kilometers deep and surrounds a large rocky core.

Analysis of data also shows that Ceres has a water - ice mantle surrounding a rocky core, and that there may still be at least pockets of liquid water beneath the surface, raising the prospect of potential habitability for microorganisms, as seemingly unlikely as that may sound for a world so far from the Sun.

This hydrogen could be a byproduct of chemical reactions going on between the moon's rocky core and the warm water surrounding it.

Assuming an iron - rich planet with an internal structure like Earth, modelling results for the first discovered super-Earth (GJ 876 d) indicate the existence of a threshold in planetary diameter above which a super-Earth «most certainly» has a high water content (an «ocean planet» or «water world,» where thick layers of water and pressurized ice surround a rocky mantle and core); this threshold was found to be around 24,000 kilometers (or nearly 15,000 miles) in the particular case of GJ 876 d (Valencia et al, 2007).

The ocean is several tens of kilometres deep and surrounds a large rocky core.