The European spacecraft COROT has discovered a massive planet-sized object orbiting its parent star closely, unlike anything ever spotted before. It is so exotic, that scientists are unsure as to whether this oddity is actually a planet or a failed star.
© OAMPRelative sizes of the Sun, COROT-exo-3b and Jupiter, an artist's impression.
The object, named COROT-exo-3b, is about the size of Jupiter, but packs more than 20 times the mass. It takes only 4 days and 6 hours to orbit its parent star, which is slightly larger than the Sun.
COROT-exo-3b was found as the satellite observed the drop in the brightness of the star each time the object (COROT-exo-3b) passed in front. "We were taken by surprise when we found this massive object orbiting so close to its parent star", said Dr Magali Deleuil from the Laboratoire d'Astrophysique de Marseille (LAM), leader of the team that made the discovery. She added, "COROT-exo-3b is really unique - we're still debating its nature."
Comment: A 12 hour warning is not exactly reassuring, is it? Research collected on this site has shown that the killer space debris, when they come, will likely be comet fragments rather than asteroids. Comet fragments have the bad habit of travelling in large clusters and have been shown to hit the Earth much more frequently than admitted by mainstream science.