THE Hubble Space Telescope has found what seem to be planets whipping around their host stars in less than 24 hours, giving them the shortest 鈥測ear鈥� on record.
Kailash Sahu of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, and his team found 16 stars close to the centre of the Milky Way whose light periodically dimmed by up to 10 per cent, most likely due to Jupiter-sized planets blocking some starlight (Nature, vol 443, p 534).
Five of these planets are going around small, dim stars in record-breaking periods of 10 to 23 hours, whereas the other planets found so far have been mainly around bright stars and have periods longer than 1.2 days. Any closer to the brighter stars and the planets might boil away, Sahu says.
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