Free Republic

Astronomers at Penn State University have identified an exoplanet with the most eccentric orbit ever observed among transiting planets...Named TIC 241249530, this newly discovered exoplanet exhibits a highly elongated orbit resembling a cucumber rather than a circle. Published in the journal Nature, the study provides significant insights into the formation and evolution of Hot Jupiters, a class of massive gas giants that orbit very close to their host stars...First detected using NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) in January 2020, the exoplanet's host star exhibited a dip in its brightness, indicating the presence of a Jupiter-sized planet passing in front...

ATLANTA (Reuters) - Stars heat planets: that's the astronomical rule. But a big gassy planet in the constellation Sagittarius is warming the star it orbits, just the opposite of what happens between Earth and the sun, scientists said on Wednesday. The hot spot on the star, known to astronomers as HD179949, might have been mistaken for a sun spot except that it is moving at the pace of the planet's orbit, rather than at the speed the star is rotating. "This is the first glimpse of a magnetic field on an extrasolar planet," Canadian researcher Evgenya Shkolnik of the University...