The presence of a Jupiter-mass companion to the star 51 Pegasi is inferred from observations of periodic variations in the star’s radial velocity. The companion lies only about eight million kilometres from the star, which would be well inside the orbit of Mercury in our Solar System. This object might be a gas-giant planet that has migrated to this location through orbital evolution, or from the radiative stripping of a brown dwarf.
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Acknowledgements
We thank G. Burki for analysis of photometric data, W. Benz for stimul-ating discussions, A. Burrows for communicating preliminary estimates of the radius of Jupiter at different distances from the Sun, and F. Pont for his careful reading of the manuscript. We also thank all our colleagues of Marseille and Haute-Provence Observatories involved in the building and operation of the ELODIE spectrograph, namely G. Adrianzyk, A. Baranne, R. Cautain, G. Knispel, D. Kohler, D. Lacroix, J.-P. Meunier, G. Rimbaud and A. Vin.
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Mayor, M., Queloz, D. A Jupiter-mass companion to a solar-type star. Nature 378, 355–359 (1995). https://doi.org/10.1038/378355a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/378355a0
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