A highly eccentric exoplanet
For centuries, the solar system was viewed as a standard blueprint for planetary systems in the universe, with a star (our sun) at the center of a circular track, and a planet orbiting within each lane. Smaller, rockier planets fill the interior lanes, and larger gas giants orbit further out. But over the last 20 years, more powerful telescopes have revealed, far from our solar system, a host of exotic systems with completely unexpected configurations. “Hot Jupiters,” for example, are massive “roaster” planets that circle scorchingly close to their stars. Scientists have puzzled over how these gas giants, which supposedly form far from their stars, end up on such blistering orbits. Now an even weirder planetary system may render the puzzle more challenging. Using NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, scientists from MIT, the Space Telescope Science Institute, the University of California at Santa Cruz, and elsewhere have observed an exoplanet by the name...