The Newly Discovered Planet That Orbits Backwards!

Cool news from space I’ve been meaning to post…

WASP-17, a newly discovered planet about 1,000 light-years away, orbits in the reverse direction as the star it revolves around! This is BIG news in science because every other world we’ve observed does the opposite. Most likely, a near collision with another planet early on led to its strange orbit. The discovery was made by graduate students David Anderson at Keele University and Amaury Triaud of the Geneva Observatory with the UK’s Wide Area Search for Planets (WASP) project. WASP-17 is also estimated to be two times the size–but half the mass–of Jupiter meaning this becomes the largest known planet in the universe.

An artist’s impression of a transiting exoplanet. Credit:NASA/Hubble

August 24th, 2009 10:15 PM
in Astronomy, Media and Science, Space | 6 comments | RSS feed | Trackback >

6 Responses to “The Newly Discovered Planet That Orbits Backwards!”

1. Julian Says:
August 24th, 2009 at 10:59 pm

Cool!
2. Rules For Says:
August 24th, 2009 at 11:27 pm

1000 light years seems really far away. Does anybody here know the most distant exoplanet detected?
3. Roadtripper Says:
August 25th, 2009 at 12:46 am

For what it’s worth, wikipedia has a list of exo-planets. Here’s the most distant:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SWEEPS-04

Compared to this, 1000 light years doesn’t seem so far.

Rt
4. Richard William Nelson Says:
August 25th, 2009 at 1:19 am

It is the unpredictability of nature that makes life exciting.
5. Rules For Says:
August 25th, 2009 at 10:18 am

Wow, 22,000 light years – that’s incredibly far! And being in Sagittarius must mean it’s only a few thousand light years from the center of the galaxy. Thanks for the link!
6. yea my name is stacy and im a crazy geek girl ♥ Says:
January 18th, 2010 at 9:00 am

OMG!!! I LAHB iT..! IM GONNA PUT THIS ARTICLE ON MY BLOG IN BLOGGER..:) THNX PEACE!

AND

P.S

SAVE THE EARTH!..:)

- s T a c y

a.k.a

GEEK_GURL