55 Cancri e: The 18‑Hour Hell Planet

Added: 2026-05-16

[00:00:01]There's a planet so extreme it breaks almost every rule of nature. It's called 55 Cancri e, also known as Janssen, and it lies about 41 light years from Earth.

[00:00:14]One of the first super-Earths ever discovered and still one of the strangest. It orbits its star so closely that a full year lasts just 18 hours.

[00:00:25]It's tidally locked with one side in eternal daylight and the other in endless night. On the day side, temperatures rise above 3,000 K, hot enough to melt iron and vaporize rock. For years, scientists thought this world was just a glowing ocean of lava with a thin atmosphere of vaporized stone. But then JWST [music] looked at it and everything changed. New data revealed that 55 [music] Cancri e has a real atmosphere, rich in carbon dioxide or carbon monoxide, likely fed by a violent, [music] churning magma ocean that constantly outgasses into space. Some researchers think this could [music] even be a carbon world with a crust of graphite and a mantle that may contain diamond under crushing pressure. Its heat shifts wildly as if massive volcanic eruptions are blasting [music] clouds of dust and gas across the surface. A world of fire, of storms made of rock, of ice that survives in temperatures hotter than flame. 55 Cancri e is a planet that shouldn't exist, but does.