10 Insane Planets You Won't Believe Exist
3. The One Where You Can't Catch A Break
There's really no winning with CoRoT-7b. No matter which way you slice it, it's absolutely awful.
Just like Muspelheim, CoRoT-7b is a lava-ocean planet. Everything that applied to the previous entry applies here, as well. It's tidally locked, so the star-facing side constantly hovers around 4,700 °F. While that's nowhere near as horrible as, say, Kepler-70b, it's still hotter than Muspelheim, and it's insurmountably hostile to the development of life. It's covered in a vast sea of lava. It rains rocks, and it could also theoretically rain perovskite and geikielite, two titanium-based oxide minerals.
That's all well and good, but this is where it somehow gets worse than its predecessor: the side facing away from its star can - theoretically - reach temperatures of -392 °F. Sure, you COULD escape the heat, unlike Muspelheim, but the shadier part of the planet won't treat you much better. The cold isn't quite as extreme as the hot, but it's still cold enough to kill you in seconds.
So there you go. On one side, you have the widely accepted image of the Biblical Hell, while the other side, you've got the Ninth Circle of Hell in Dante's "Inferno": a cold, frozen wasteland.
Abandon hope all ye who enter here.