The Scorched Magma Ocean and Vaporized Rock Atmosphere of Super-Earth CoRoT-7b
In February 2009, the French Space Agency’s CoRoT space telescope detected a faint, periodic dip in the light emitting from a G-type main-sequence star located roughly 489 light-years from Earth in the constellation Monoceros . That transit signal marked the discovery of CoRoT-7b , a watershed milestone in exoplanetary science. Subsequent precision radial-velocity measurements using the HARPS spectrograph confirmed that CoRoT-7b was the first exoplanet identified with a mass and radius definitively establishing a terrestrial, rocky composition. Yet despite sharing a solid-density baseline with the terrestrial worlds of the solar system, CoRoT-7b represents a class of extreme planetary environments entirely alien to our neighborhood: the ultra-short-period lava-world Super-Earth . Orbital Mechanics and Tidal Locking Orbiting its host star at a distance of just 0.0172 astronomical units—roughly 2.5 million kilometers, or more than 20 times closer than Mercury orbits our Sun—C...