Planet hotter than most stars spotted 25 light years away

摘要

ASTRONOMERS may have detected a planet around a nearby star -potentially the second hottest exoplanet ever found. Spencer Hurt at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and his colleagues used 10 years of observations of Vega, a bright star just 25 light years from our solar system, to look for the telltale gravitational tug of planets. They were able to spot a potential world that orbits the star every 2.43 Earth days, at a distance 10 times closer than Mercury orbits the sun. It has a mass up to 20 times that of Earth, making it a so-called "hot Jupiter", but its close proximity coupled with the star's brightness - almost 60 times the luminosity of our sun - would make it especially warm.