* Astronomy

Super-dense celestial bodies could be a new kind of planet

Mysterious dense bodies outside the Solar System could be the remnants of ice giants similar to Neptune that wandered too close to their suns, according to results presented this week at a meeting on exoplanets at the Royal Society in London.
Among the most puzzling finds of NASA's Kepler space mission to find exoplanets, which launched in 2009, are bodies too heavy for their size. In some of the rare cases in which astronomers can estimate both the mass and the size of distant planets discovered by the probe, the objects have radiuses similar to that of Earth but are denser than pure iron. 
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