Found this as a link when I was checking my email, thought I would share it with you all.
[url=http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2007/05/07/fatplanet_spa.html?category=space&guid=20070507093000"]Original Page here[/url]
May 7, 2007 — Watching the scale? Stay away from HAT-P-2b, a fatty-boy planet with so much gravity a 150-pound person would weigh in at more than a ton.
The gas giant, estimated to be eight times the mass of Jupiter, was found by a team of astronomers orbiting a beast of a star located about 440 light years away in the constellation Hercules.
Not only is HAT-P-2b the largest planet found to date, it's also one of weirdest, circling its mother sun in a highly elliptical track that comes as close as 3.1 million miles before sashaying three times as far away. And it makes the trek, sizzling near the sun and freezing on the outback, every 5.6 days.
"This planet is so unusual that at first we thought it was a false alarm — something that appeared to be a planet but wasn't. But we eliminated every other possibility," said astronomer Gáspár Bakos, with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass.
The planet's strange orbit is what alerted astronomers to its existence in the first place.
HAT-P-2b spends more time than any other known extra solar body passing in front of its host star, a virtual red signal to planet hunters specializing in measuring the faint dimming of starlight as orbiting planets fly by.
Scientists estimated the planet's mass by measuring how much the mother star wobbles, a phenomenon caused by the planet's gravity. Though HAT-P-2b is more than eight times the mass of Jupiter, it's squashed into a ball only slightly larger than our solar system's own giant planet.
The size was determined by measuring the star's brightness as the planet transits.
"This object is close to the boundary between a star and a planet," said Harvard astronomer Dimitar Sasselov. "With 50 percent more mass, it could have begun nuclear fusion for a short time."
As for HAT-P-2b's strange orbit, astronomers figure there is a sister world out there, with its own firm gravitational hold on its newly revealed sibling.
Typically, gravitational forces between a star and a closely orbiting planet tend to circularize the planet's path. All other known planets that cross the face of their parent star have circular orbits.
08 May 2007, 8:51 am
