Largest planet ever discovered, WASP-17

wasp17 The WIDE AREA SEARCH for PLANETS project more known as WASP based in UK and with collaboration with Geneva conservatory announced today its discovery of a new planet with a unique behavior of orbiting backward.

Sara Seager, an astrophysicist at MIT who was not involved in the discovery commented,”I would have to say this is one of the strangest planets we know about.”

WASP project which monitors hundreds of thousands of stars found its 17th extrasolar planet called WASP-17. The newfound planet is exceptionally rare as it orbits backward compared to the rotation of its host star which they call as retrograde orbit.
WASP-17 has the size twice as much the size of Jupiter making it the largest planet ever discovered. Unlike any other planet discovered so far, it orbits opposite to its star’s direction of rotation. Astronomer David Anderson from Keele University said,”ewly formed solar systems can be violent places. Our own Moon is thought to have been created when a Mars-sized planet collided with the recently formed Earth and threw up a cloud of debris. A near collision during the early, violent stage of this planetary system could well have caused a gravitational slingshot, flinging WASP-17 into its backwards orbit.”

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 13th, 2009 at 5:07 pm and is filed under Science & Medicine. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.