- In the constellation Hercules, the planet WASP-103b orbits its parent star very closely and in less than a day.
- As a result, the tidal forces on the exoplanet are extraordinarily strong – and deform it into a rugby ball.
- This discovery was made by the international research team with the participation of the Universities of Bern and Geneva with the help of the Swiss space telescope Cheops.
It was the first time that such a deformation could be detected in an exoplanet, it said in a statement on Tuesday. The mass and radius of the planet WASP-103b are about one and a half times as large as those of Jupiter in our solar system. The results were in “Astronomy & Astrophysics” journal published.
The exoplanet orbits its star, which is around 200 degrees hotter than the sun, in just 22 hours. The orbit is almost fifty times narrower than that of the earth around the sun. These orbital properties mean that the uplifts and downfalls caused by the tides are extreme: the forces pull the planet so strongly that its appearance is reminiscent of a rugby ball.