William Atkins
Tuesday, 16 September 2008 19:54
Science -
Space
Page 2 of 3
The star is named 1RXS J160929.1-210524. It is located within the Upper Scorpius, about 500 light-years from our solar system.
The Upper Scorpius is a subgroup of the Scorpius-Centaurus (Sco-Cen) Association, which is the nearest OB star cluster from the Sun.
The Sco-Cen Association is composed of the Upper Scorpius, Upper Centaurus-Lupus, and the Lower Centaurus-Crux. The Association is about 380 to 470 light-years from the Sun, where a light-year is the distance that light travels in a vacuum over a one Earth-year period.
An OB star cluster is a classification of stars, which are hot, massive stars of spectral types O or B. They are short-lived stars.
The exoplanet is about eight times the mass of the planet Jupiter.
Its distance from its parent star is about eleven times the distance between the average distance between our Sun and the planet Neptune—about 330 astronomical units (AU, where one AU is the average distance between the Earth and the Sun, about 93 million miles [150 million kilometers]).
Neptune is about 2.7 billion miles (4.5 billion kilometers) from the Sun, or about 30 astronomical units (AU).
See the image of the star and planet on page three.
