Second backwards planet found, a day after the first

Second backwards planet found, a day after the first



Just a day after the announcement of the first extrasolar planet found orbiting its star backwards, two other teams announced the discovery of a second one.

"It is funny that the two good cases for really misaligned orbits, even retrograde orbits, have come at around the same time," says Joshua Winn of MIT, lead author of one of the new papers.

Both Winn's team and another, led by Norio Narita at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, used the Japanese Subaru telescope to observe planet HAT-P-7b, a previously known planet about 1000 light years from Earth that was recently observed by NASA's new planet-hunting satellite Kepler.

Both teams found that the planet's orbit is wildly tilted with respect to its star's equator.

much more: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17613-second-backwards-planet-found-a-day-after-the-first.html

and not too hard to explain as ejected out of some older orbit. These things are huge. If they were ejected from somewhere else, it must have been quite an event.

:+

Still very cool though. Thanks for posting.

and you're welcome!

:)

usually they prefer developing or underprivileged.