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WASP-17: Researchers Baffled Over Backwards Planet
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by Alyzee | August 12, 2009 at 03:59 pm
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WASP-17 is a backwards planet. It's actually orbiting around its star in the opposite direction to the spin of its host star. The first planet that orbits its star in the opposite direction of its star's rotation has been discovered by the Wide Area Search for Planets (WASP) consortium of universities in the UK, according to the BBC. The planets oppositional orbit is known as a 'retrograde' orbit. Research about the new object, named WASP-17b, is being submitted to the Astrophysical Journal to be published.
The gas giant is about twice the size of Jupiter, but has about half the mass.
The planet is thought to have been forced into its retrograde motion by a close encounter with the gravitational pull of a passing star or another planet.
According to Coel Hellier, one of the authors of the research, retrograde orbits are considered to be extremely rare:
"With everything [in the star system] swirling around the same way and the star spinning the same way, you have to do quite a lot to it to make it go in the opposite direction," he told BBC News.
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at 15:06 on August 14th, 2009
Like Bizarro World.