"We've discovered a very bizarre new object, so the people who do the theoretical structure models are left scratching their heads as to what could possibly be going on," Noyes told reporters during a press conference this morning at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.
"At the moment it's an unsolved problem."
HAT-P-1 orbits one of a pair of twin stars that is very much like our sun but nearly a billion years younger.
(See a virtual solar system.)
The star is bright enough to be seen with a pair of binoculars, but HAT-P-1 is not visible.
The planet was detected by measuring the dip in starlight, lasting about two hours, that occurs each time HAT-P-1 passes between its star and Earth.
Many extrasolar planets have been discovered in recent years. But HAT-P-1 is only the 12th that transits between its star and Earth, enabling scientists to directly measure its size and mass and calculate its density.
HAT-P-1 is the second extrasolar planet found to be perplexingly large, confirming that the first planet is not a fluke.
The new planet was spied by the HAT telescope network, which consists of four instruments at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory's Whipple Observatory in Arizona and two others at its Submillimeter Array facility in Hawaii.
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