Rugby Ball? A Planet With One Of The Most Unusual Shapes Ever Seen Discovered @TheCosmosNews

Planets are all globes, right? Wrong. If they are like WASP-103b, then they are far from the perfect orbs we see in our mind’s eyes — rather, a new discovery reveals some planets might look more like a potato. The discovery — The planet, WASP-103b, is located around an F-type star 1500 light-years away from Earth. This star is larger and more massive than the Sun, and the planet is also large, about one-and-a-half times the size of Jupiter. An international team of astronomers published fresh findings in Astronomy & Astrophysics on Tuesday that detail the world’s weird shape for the first time. It seems that because of its close proximity to its home star — less than 20,000 miles — tidal stresses pull WASP-103b into an unlikely shape, which astronomers have compared to a rugby ball. It also looks a bit like an egg or a potato. Here’s the background — Planets in our Solar System exist millions of miles from our host star, and they take at least a few months, a year (Earth!), or many years to make one full orbit of the Sun. But a group of exoplanets known as Hot Jupiters orbit their home stars in a matter of days, sometimes just hours. Hot Jupiters which orbit their star in less than a day are known as ultra-short-period planets. Astronomers initially discovered WASP-103b in 2014, and noted at the time that the planet must experience severe tidal stresses due to its proximity to its home star — it orbits WASP-103 in 22 hours. This is not the shortest known orbital period — some exoplanets have been found with periods less than 10 hours — but it is short enough to make WASP-103b a pretty extreme world. When it was discovered, scientists suspected it might have an unusual shape based on modeling, though it was unconfirmed — until now.