Astrophysicists from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics have just published a major new discovery in Nature Astronomy: the first direct confirmation of a giant, Jupiter-like planet orbiting the star Kepler-160, about 3,000 light-years away from Earth. This is the first time a planet of this size has been seen orbiting a star so far away. The planet, named Kepler-160b, is about 1.8 times the size of Jupiter and orbits its star at a distance of 1.2 AU (about the same as the Earth-Sun distance). The planet’s orbit is also nearly circular, and it moves around its star in about 370 days. This is an incredible discovery, as it opens up the possibility of finding more of these exoplanets around other stars in the universe.

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source: Phys.org