TWO of the hundred or so planets discovered orbiting stars outside the Solar System do not exist after all.
Astronomers have realised that what appeared to be a Jupiter-sized planet orbiting the star HD 192262 is actually a giant sunspot on the surface of the star. Gregory Henry of Tennessee State University and colleagues at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics found that a red shift in the star’s light spectrum that was originally thought to be caused by a planet’s gravity was in fact due to the sunspot.
Meanwhile, recent spectral observations of the star HD 83443c conducted by Paul…
