Giant exoplanet orbiting a cool small star found

Sydney, May 2: Australian astronomers have discovered a strange exoplanet orbiting a small cool star 500 light years away. With an orbit of just one-tenth that of Mercury, the planet orbits its star every 3.3 days, the researchers found. "We have found a small star, with a giant planet the size of Jupiter, orbiting very closely," said researcher George Zhou from Research School of Astrophysics and Astronomy at The Australian National University. According to the researchers, the prevalent ideas about how planets form cannot explain the new finding. "It must have formed further out and migrated in, but our theories cannot explain how this happened," Zhou said. The host star of the latest exoplanet, HATS-6, is classed as an M-dwarf, which is one of the most numerous types of stars in galaxy.