14 DAY TRIAL // Discovering planets from outside our solar system by using the indirect radial velocity technique seems to have lost its novelty factor as of late, but it doesn't lower the merits and importance of adding to the growing number of exoplanets. The latest member of the exoplanet discoveries club, called OGLE2-TR-L9b, is different from its predecessors in a series of aspects.
First of all, the planet was found by a trio of students – Meta de Hoon, Remco van der Burg, and Francis Vuijsje – from the Leiden University in The Netherlands. Secondly, they came upon the planet by mistake, while they were involved in an algorithm research project. "The project was actually meant to teach the students how to develop search algorithms. But they did so well that there was time to test their algorithm on a so far unexplored database. At some point they came into my office and showed me this light curve. I was completely taken aback," shared Ignas Snellen, project supervisor, as cited by Eurekalert.
Meta de Hoon gives more details about the other oddities of the planet, "It is exciting not just to find a planet, but to find one as unusual as this one; it turns out to be the first planet discovered around a fast-rotating star, and it's also the hottest star found with a planet". The planet is five times Jupiter's size and was found by the decrease in the light of its star observed every 2.5 days, which is how long a complete orbit takes.
"ReMeFra-1," as the students call it after their own names, orbits the hot star – whose surface temperature reaches 6,700 °Celsius (12,000 °Fahrenheit), while our Sun only gets to 5,500 °C (10,000 °F) – from a distance equal to only 3% of that between the Earth and the Sun. "This is the first planet found around a fast-rotating star, because it is very difficult to confirm planets around these objects," Snellen told SPACE.