Scientists Discover Planet Composed Largely of Magma and Rotten-Egg Gas, Immediately Rule Out Tourism (except to perv demographic)

SPACE — Astronomers have identified an exoplanet covered by a permanent ocean of molten rock beneath a thick sulfur-rich atmosphere containing enough hydrogen sulfide to smell overwhelmingly of rotten eggs. Cool, huh?

At last, Virginia’s summer landfill experience has gone interstellar.

“Boiling heat, summer stench,
‘Neath the black, the sky looks dead.”
Black Hole Sun by Soundgarden.

The planet, L 98-59 d, orbits a red dwarf roughly 34 light-years from Earth in the constellation Volans. It measures about 1.6 times Earth’s diameter but has an unusually low density, properties that have puzzled astronomers since the planet was discovered in 2019. Observations from the James Webb Space Telescope and subsequent modeling now suggest an extraordinarily volatile-rich world unlike anything in the solar system.

Researchers publishing in Nature Astronomy modeled L 98-59 d as possessing a permanent magma ocean, maintained over billions of years by atmospheric insulation, tidal heating and other processes. Rather than having Earth’s familiar crust, upper mantle and lower mantle, much of the planet’s rocky interior remains a churning partially molten layer.

Reuters reported that the magma ocean may extend between roughly 2,775 and 3,565 miles deep — 4,465 to 5,740 kilometers — accounting for approximately 70% to 90% of the planet’s interior radius in the researchers’ models.

For comparison, Earth has several distinct internal layers.

L 98-59 d appears to have selected soup.

Its atmosphere improves matters considerably by making everything worse.

The researchers’ models and JWST observations point toward a hydrogen-rich atmosphere containing sulfur-bearing compounds including hydrogen sulfide and sulfur dioxide. Reuters reported an estimated hydrogen-sulfide concentration around 10% in one interpretation—an extraordinary amount considering the human nose can detect the compound at concentrations around parts per billion.

Hydrogen sulfide is responsible for the familiar smell associated with rotten eggs.

One researcher helpfully noted that a visitor would not survive long enough to appreciate it.

The surface temperature exceeds approximately 1,500 degrees Celsius, or 2,732 degrees Fahrenheit, which means a hypothetical astronaut approaching the planet could experience a richly layered sequence of sensory discoveries beginning with vaporization and ending almost immediately thereafter.

Scientists therefore do not consider L 98-59 d a promising location for life as humanity presently understands it.

The timeshare market remains more optimistic.

The planet is particularly interesting because it does not fit neatly into the two common explanations astronomers use for small, low-density exoplanets. Such worlds are often modeled either as rocky planets retaining hydrogen-helium envelopes or as water-rich worlds. The new study instead finds that L 98-59 d may have formed unusually rich in hydrogen and sulfur, creating an entirely different evolutionary pathway.

That matters because the solar system provides a frustratingly small sample size for understanding planets.

Humanity grew up with eight of them and immediately began assuming it understood real estate.

More than 6,100 exoplanets had been identified by the time of the March report, and each improvement in telescopes has revealed planetary arrangements that would have sounded unnecessarily extravagant in old science fiction: ultra-hot Jupiters, ocean candidates, tidally locked worlds, planets orbiting dead stars and now a swollen super-Earth with a molten interior beneath an atmosphere that could fumigate a continent.

Researchers reconstructed nearly five billion years of possible evolution for L 98-59 d using coupled atmospheric and interior computer models. Their results suggest that the same magma ocean making the planet spectacularly inhospitable also helps preserve gases inside its mantle and replenish its atmosphere through degassing over enormous periods of time.

It is effectively a self-sustaining planetary crockpot.

The discovery also highlights one of the increasingly pleasant humiliations of modern astronomy.

For most of human history, philosophers constructed elaborate theories about what planets must be like based largely upon the handful visible from home. Modern instruments have begun examining actual distant worlds and returning repeatedly with the scientific equivalent of nerd-bro huffing nitrous oxide, pointing to their greasy laptop screen, and telling you:

“Look, man. I found another one.”

Even the researchers leaned into it. Planetary scientist Raymond Pierrehumbert remarked that the exoplanet era keeps revealing worlds stranger than those imagined in Star Trek.

L 98-59 d does not contain known aliens, breathable air, oceans, forests or any plausible destination for humanity.

What it does contain is an ocean thousands of miles deep made of molten planetary interior beneath a poison atmosphere that smells like sulfur.

Thirty-four light-years away, the universe has apparently maintained an entire planet in the condition of a gas-station bathroom located directly above Hell.

Astronomers are delighted for some reason.