Hellish conditions have warped an Earth-like planet into an egg

A distant Earth-sized planet is orbiting so close to its parent star that gravity is stretching it to an extreme degree, turning it egg-shaped.

A handful of known exoplanets are extremely close to their parent stars, which exposes them to incredibly harsh conditions. These “ultra-short period” planets – they take less than a day to complete one loop around their stars – are blasted with radiation and often have surfaces composed entirely of lava.

Now, Fei Dai at the University of Hawaiʻi and his colleagues have discovered…