Home News (Image credit: ESA) Planets are typically round bodies in space that orbit stars, at least most of the time anyway: We’ve just gotten our first look at an exoplanet that has been deformed by its star’s gravity into a rugby ball-like body.While it sounds weird as heck, this isn’t unexpected — but it is the first time we’ve ever actually seen something like this out in the universe. The exoplanet, detected by the ESA’s Cheops exoplanet-hunting mission, orbits WASP-103 in the constellation Hercules. Cheops finds exoplanets by measuring the light of stars and watching for telltale dips in luminosity when a possible exoplanet passes between us and the star. Dips that come at regular, precise intervals are very strong evidence of an exoplanet.This exoplanet, WASP-103b, is a gas giant about twice the size of Jupiter with 1.5 times its mass. But rather than orbiting out in the farther reaches of its solar system, WASP-103b is what’s known as a “hot Jupiter”. These are gas giants that orbit extremely close to their star, often much closer than even Mercury orbits our Sun. As a result, these exoplanets typically orbit their stars much faster than we’re used to seeing, but W… Click below to read the full story from TechRadar
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