The latest find from an international planet-hunting team of
amateur and professional astronomers is one of the oddest
extrasolar planets ever cataloged -- a mammoth orb more than 13
times the mass of Jupiter that orbits its star in less than four
days. Researchers from the U.S.-based XO Project unveiled the
planet, XO-3b, at today's American Astronomical Society meeting
in Honolulu. Christopher Johns-Krull, a Rice University
astronomer and presenter of the team's results, said, "This
planet is really quite bizarre. It is also particularly
appropriate to be announcing this find here, since the core of
the XO project is two small telescopes operating here in
Hawaii." "Of the 200-plus exoplanets found so far, XO-3b is an
oddity in several respects," said XO Project director Peter
McCullough, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science
Institute in Baltimore. "It's the largest and most massive
planet yet found in such a close orbit, and given the proximity
of the orbit to the star, we were surprised to find tha