Astronomers have discovered a giant planet with a year duration of 18 hours

24.02.2020 10:06

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Astronomers have discovered a giant planet with a year duration of 18 hours

Astronomers from the University of Warwick discovered an exoplanet orbiting a star in just 18 hours. This is the shortest orbital period ever observed for a planet of this type.

The found planet resembles Jupiter - the same gas giant. Scientists believe that the find can help to figure out whether such planets are in the process of spiral motion to their suns until they fall on it.

The planet NGTS-10b was discovered at a distance of about 1000 light-years from Earth by the Transit Survey (NGTS) exoplanet exploration system in Chile. She is engaged in the discovery of planets up to the size of Neptune using the transit method - that is, it observes the luminosity of stars. A sharp drop in brightness which indicates that the planet passed in front of the disk of the star. The star NGTS-10b has attracted the attention of astronomers due to very frequent dips in the star’s light caused by the planet’s fast orbit.

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