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Thursday August 13, 2009
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Astronomers have discovered a planet in another solar system 1,000 light years away that orbits its star opposite from the way the star rotates, making it the only planet ever discovered to do so.
The system was discovered by the UK's Wide Area Search for Planets (WASP) project in collaboration with Geneva Observatory, according to Space.com. It's also turning out to be quite a curiosity among the 350+ extrasolar planets known to date. The running theory is that the planet, dubbed WASP-17, had a close encounter with a larger one--and the resultant gravitational interaction slung WASP-17 onto its strange course.
"I would have to say this is one of the strangest planets we know about," said Sara Seager, an astrophysicist at MIT who was not involved in the discovery, in the article. "I think it's extremely exciting. It's fascinating that we can study orbits of planets so far away. There's always theory, but there's nothing like an observation to really prove it." (Image credit: NASA/Extrasolar planet artist rendering)
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August 13, 2009 11:04 PM
Whoa, what?
That's really really wierd. I mean, that would kind of wierd out our entire understanding of rotational kinematics in stellar formation if it were a planet that were formed at the same time as the rest of the solar system were formed.
The only thing I can think of is that it's some other type of body that maybe entered the system and got into an orbit after the formation of the rest of the system (I wonder if it's orbit is on-plane with the rest of the bodies in the system or at some ridiculous angle or elliptical orbit) or maybe a body that separated from another body in the system with enough force (a collision possibly) that it threw it into an orbit in an opposing direction...