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Thursday, July 24, 2008

Photo: "Weird" New Planet Weighs as Much as 2,500 Earths


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A Jupiter-size planet passes in front of its parent star in this artist's image. Such transits create tiny wobbles in a star's orbit and can periodically block light, allowing scientists to detect and study alien worlds.

Now scientists have found a massive, superdense gas giant with gravity 15 times that of Earth and the mass of eight Jupiters. "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," said Gáspár Bakos, lead author of a proposed paper describing the find, in a statement.

Image courtesy NASA, ESA, and G. Bacon