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Space

Exoplanets that orbit close to their star may have been pushed there

By Jason Arunn Murugesu

3 November 2020

hot Jupiter

We may now know why some hot Jupiters have such tight orbits

Asar Studios/Alamy

The extremely short 10-day orbits of hot Jupiters may be explained by the planets being born among a high density of stars.

Hot Jupiters have long confused astrophysicists. As the name suggests, they are planets similar in size and appearance to Jupiter – but unlike Jupiter, they lie very close to their star, which means it takes them just a matter of days to complete one orbit.

Andrew Winter at Heidelberg University, Germany, and his colleagues used data from the …

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