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Fleenor is part of a venture known as the XO Project. Funded by the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Md., the XO Project is a joint effort between professional and amateur astronomers in the United States and Europe to discover planets orbiting other stars. And it is through this collaboration that Fleenor, using his backyard observatory, was part of the discovery of two such extrasolar planets, XO-2b and XO-3b. The type of planets that the project hunts for are called transiting Jovian extrasolar planets... "Transiting" indicates that the planet's orbital plane carries it in front of the star...

Astronomers have revealed one of the strangest planets yet discovered. The extrasolar oddity is 13 times the size of Jupiter and is so close to its star that it completes an orbit in just 3.2 days... The planet was found by the XO Project, a collaboration between researchers and amateur astronomers; who help to clock up detailed observations of potential planetary systems over time... Normally, orbits of objects in close proximity to stars become circular with time, said McCullough. The egg-shaped elliptical orbit suggests XO-3b has a near neighbour tugging it out of a circular path, he said. Alternatively, astronomers...