Astronomers find bizarre planet 'unlike any other discovered so far'

[Dragoon]

Watching stars "wobble" is a tried-and-true method astronomers use to find huge planets lurking in the outer reaches of the cosmos. If a planet is big enough, its gravity tugs on its parent star just enough that we can see the faint changes in starlight. Using this method, a team of astronomers watched the star HR 5183 with three telescopes for 20 years and found a massive planet, around three times the mass of Jupiter, spinning around it on a highly unusual, egg-shaped orbit.

The new find, dubbed HR 5183 b, travels on an orbit that takes anywhere between 45 and 100 years. And its orbit is what astronomers dub "eccentric," meaning it's nothing like the circular orbits we see in our solar system. In fact, if you placed HR 5183 b in the solar system, the super-Jupiter would swing in near the sun closer than our own Jupiter and take it out beyond Neptune. Scientists have spotted comets and even other planets with elliptical orbits like this before -- but generally they're much closer to their home star.

"This planet is unlike the planets in our solar system, but more than that, it is unlike any other exoplanets we have discovered so far," said Sarah Blunt, first author on the new study. The research is set to be published in The Astronomical Journal.

When the orbit is overlaid in our own solar system, it becomes impressively obvious just how unusual it really is:



HR 5183 b travels vast distances away from its star, so even if we keep our eyes peeled in the general vicinity it'd be almost impossible for us to see the planet directly. Instead, the astronomers looked at radial velocity measurements of HR 5183 collected over two decades from Hawaii's W. M. Keck Observatory, the Lick Observatory in Northern California and the McDonald Observatory in Texas.

...

It's not the end of the line for HR 5183 b, either. The European Space Agency's Gaia spacecraft has been surveying the sky since 2013, designed to measure stars in the cosmos with incredible precision. The research team indicates that this new planet will be detectable in Gaia data.

"This newfound planet is another example of a system that is not the image of our solar system but has remarkable features that make our universe incredibly rich in its diversity," said Howard.

https://www.cnet.com/news/astronomer...overed-so-far/



(not sure how real this is but there are other links...)

https://www.sciencedaily.com/release...0828092502.htm
https://www.newsweek.com/exoplanet-b...e-seen-1456478

[alnortedelsur]

I have read about much more bizarre exoplanets than this one.

There is also a giant planet around a star in the constellation of Cygnus that has a super eccentric orbit that takes it closer to its parent start than earth from the sun, but also further away from it than the distance of Neptune from the sun. An hypothetical earth-sized moon orbiting around that Jupiter-like planet would go from burning temperatures of around 400 Celsius when the planet is the closest to its parent start to very long and freezing winters with chilling temperatures lower than -200 Celsius when the planet is the farthest from its parent star.

And there are many other exoplanets even much more bizarre than that, for many other reasons other than only their orbits.