A new study conducted by a team of researchers at Caltech has succeeded in discovering an exoplanet that they call 'unlike any other'. The newly discovered exoplanet has been named 'Planet HR 5183 b' and it has three times the mass of Jupiter.
It should be also noted that this exoplanet has a very long, egg-shaped orbit around its star, and as per initial analysis, this planet approximately takes 45 to 100 years to complete its orbit.
"If this planet were somehow placed into our own solar system, it would swing from within our asteroid belt to out beyond Neptune. Other giant planets with highly elliptical orbits have been found around other stars, but none of those worlds was located at the very outer reaches of their star systems like this one," said the researchers who took part in the study in a recent statement.
Sarah Blunt, a Caltech graduate student who is the first author of this study revealed that this new planet is unlike any other exoplanets humans have discovered so far.
Sarah mentioned that "This planet is unlike the planets in our solar system, but more than that, it is unlike any other exoplanets we have discovered so far."
"Other planets detected far away from their stars tend to have very low eccentricities, meaning that their orbits are more circular. The fact that this planet has such a high eccentricity speaks to some difference in the way that it either formed or evolved relative to the other planets."
Experts speculate that elongated eccentric orbit of this exoplanet is likely because it nudged with another similar-sized planet outside the system.
A few days ago, a study led by Anne-Marie Lagrange, research director at the CNRS at the Institute of Planetology and Astrophysics in Grenoble discovered a giant planet which is ten times bigger than Jupiter. Researchers revealed that this cosmic giant is orbiting a star named Beta Pectoris that is located approximately 63.4 light-years away from the earth.
