Find fat planet

Watch out at the scale! HAT-P-2b, a round fat planet with such gravitational pull that a person weighing nearly 70 kg on earth when there will weigh more than 1 ton.

This giant gas planet, expected to be 8 times more massive than Jupiter, was discovered by an astronomical group orbiting a star located 440 light-years away, in the constellation Hercules.

Not only is the largest planet so far, HAT-P-2b is also one of the heaviest objects, flying around its parent star on a flat elliptical path to the point that its furthest position is three times greater than its closest to the star mother. And on this miserable journey, she was heated 'sizzling' when she approached her mother's star and became bandaged when she came out the farthest, repeating the cycle after 5.6 days.

Its strange orbits hit astronomers in the first place, to the point that people were initially concerned that it was not a planet. Although the HAT-P-2b is 8 times heavier than Jupiter, it is compressed into a ball just a little better than our Jupiter.

HAT-P-2b with a wild orbit. (Photo: NASA)

"This object is close to the boundary between a star and an act," said Dimitar Sasselov, an astronomer at Harvard University, saying, "Just 50% more mass, it will start the particle fusion reaction." multiply in a short time ".

Explaining the strange path of HAT-P-2b, astronomers conjecture that a sister of the planet is there, with a strong gravitational force that keeps HAT-P-2b in its orbit. me

T. An