Anonymous18 days ago
An international team led by the University of Oxford has identified L 98-59 d — a super-Earth 35 light-years from Earth — as the first recognized member of an entirely new class of exoplanet: a molten, sulfur-rich world sustained by a perpetual magma ocean thousands of kilometers deep. Published in Nature Astronomy on March 16, 2026, the discovery challenges the existing two-category framework for classifying small planets and suggests that the true diversity of worlds beyond our solar system is far richer than previously understood.