Astronomers discover giant planet
Afp, Honolulu
Professional and amateur astronomers announced on Wednesday the discovery of a "bizarre" planet outside the solar system that is more than 13 times the mass of Jupiter. The planet known as XO-3b is "an oddity" compared to the more than 200 extrasolar planets found so far, said Peter McCullough, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, in a press release. "It's the largest and most massive planet yet found in such a close orbit, and given the proximity of the orbit to the star, we were surprised to find that the orbit is not circular but significantly elliptical," McCullough said. He and other researchers presented their findings on Wednesday at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Honolulu in the state of Hawaii. "This planet is really quite bizarre," said Christopher Johns-Krull, an astronomer from Rice University.
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