Lonely Planets: Alien 'Hot Earths' Have Few Friends

Hot Earths — scorched, Earth-size worlds that are closer to their stars than Mercury is to the sun — may often be lonely planets, either far removed from any other worlds or the only planets in their systems, a new study finds. These isolated hot Earths may be the charred remnants of much-larger worlds, or they may be exoplanets whose interactions with massive disks of gas and dust dragged them perilously close to their stars, researchers said. In the past two decades, astronomers ha