Scientists discovered a gigantic exoplanet, HATS-18b

International team of astronomers found an alien world named HATS-18b. It is a giant hot Jupiter exoplanet tidally spinning up its parent star.

The team led by Kaloyan Penev of Princeton University carried out the observation campaign between April 2011 and July 2013. The new findings were published online on 2 June 2016 on arXiv.org.

About Exoplanet, HATS-18b

• The newly discovered planetary system could be a great laboratory for to test the theories of planet–star interactions.

• The research team used the Hungarian-made Automated Telescope Network-South (HATSouth) to obtain over 10000 images of this sun-like star while finding the exoplanets orbiting HATS-18.

• The astronomers also conducted a series of follow-up spectroscopic observations in 2015 using the 2.3 m telescope at the Siding Spring Observatory in Australia and the 2.2 m MPG/ESO telescope at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Chile.

• The radial velocity signals collected by the researchers allowed them to distinguish a sinusoidal variation in phase with the transit ephemeris, confirming the presence of a massive planet around HATS-18.

• The research also reveled that the newly found exoplanet have the characteristics similar to that of Jupiter.

• It have radius that accounts of about 1.34 times and mass is of 2 times of Jupiter. Jupiter is the biggest planet of our solar system.

• The orbital period of HATS-18b equals 0.84 days which accounts to be very short.

• It was also found that the Planet HATS-18b with high mass and short orbital period implies the strong tidal coupling between the planetary orbit and the star which shows evidence of significant tidal spin up.

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