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Extrasolar planets

Too close for comfort

Nature volume 430, pages 24–25 (2004)Cite this article

Three gas-giant planets have now been found in puzzlingly close orbits around their stars. These ‘very hot Jupiters’ raise questions about planet-finding methods and our understanding of planetary systems.

Before 1995, the Solar System was our only known example of a system of planets orbiting a central star. We had convinced ourselves that its layout — small inner rocky planets and large outer gaseous planets — made sense on general principles. But then the first planet discovered outside the Solar System, the first extrasolar planet, fell completely outside the paradigm: it was a gas giant, similar to Jupiter in mass, but with an orbit eight times closer to its star than Mercury's is to the Sun1. More of these ‘hot Jupiters’ (orbiting within a tenth of the Earth–Sun distance) were soon found, making it clear that the principles underlying the formation of planetary systems needed some revision. The detection since then of three ‘very hot Jupiters’ — two of which are now confirmed by Bouchy et al.2 in Astronomy and Astrophysics — has strained the theory even further.

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  1. Department of Astronomy, University of California, Berkeley, 94720, California, USA

    Gibor Basri

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  1. Gibor Basri
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Basri, G. Too close for comfort. Nature 430, 24–25 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1038/430024a

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