Two groups of astronomers working independently in Germany have discovered a massive new exoplanet that’s quite strange–for a few reasons.
The newfound exoplanet, dubbed Kepler-432b, was monitored by NASA’s Kepler space telescope from 2009 to 2013 and identified as a planetary candidate in 2011. Using the 2.2-meter telescope at Calar Alto Observatory in AndalucĂa, Spain and the Nordic Optical Telescope on La Palma in the Canary Islands, the researchers are now confirming that, indeed, it’s a planet.
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Two papers describing the discovery have been published in the January 2015 issue of the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.