Detecting giant planets

Astronomers have announced that they have discovered a "strange" planet outside the Solar System, which is 15 times more massive than Jupiter.

According to astronomer Peter McCullough at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, the planet is named XO-3b . This is the " strange " planet compared to more than 200 outer planets The solar system has been found.

'It is the largest and heaviest planet ever found and is close to the parent star orbit (it took less than four days to spin around the parent star). We were surprised to discover that this planet orbit is not a circle but an ellipse, " McCullough said.

Christopher Johns-Krull, an astronomer from Rice University, admits that "this planet is really strange" and that astronomers are currently debating whether to put it in a group of brown dwarfs ^(*). or not. XO-3b was discovered by telescope located on Mount Haleakala in Hawaii.

Illustrated planet XO-1b, very similar to the newly discovered planet XO-3b
(Photo: LiveScience)

WALL VY

(*) Brown dwarfs: objects larger than a planet but smaller than a normal star