WASP-14b
Encyclopedia
WASP-14b is an extrasolar planet
Extrasolar planet
An extrasolar planet, or exoplanet, is a planet outside the Solar System. A total of such planets have been identified as of . It is now known that a substantial fraction of stars have planets, including perhaps half of all Sun-like stars...

 discovered in 2008 by SuperWASP
SuperWASP
SuperWASP is an international academic organisation performing an ultra-wide angle search for transiting extrasolar planets with the aim of covering the entire sky down to ~15th magnitude.-Equipment:...

 using the transit method
Methods of detecting extrasolar planets
Any planet is an extremely faint light source compared to its parent star. In addition to the intrinsic difficulty of detecting such a faint light source, the light from the parent star causes a glare that washes it out...

. Follow-up radial velocity measurements showed that the mass of WASP-14b is almost eight times larger than that of Jupiter
Jupiter
Jupiter is the fifth planet from the Sun and the largest planet within the Solar System. It is a gas giant with mass one-thousandth that of the Sun but is two and a half times the mass of all the other planets in our Solar System combined. Jupiter is classified as a gas giant along with Saturn,...

. The radius found by the transit observations show that it has a radius 25% larger than Jupiter. This makes WASP-14b one of the densest exoplanets known. Its radius best fits the model of Fortney.

Rotation

As of August 2008, the most recent calculation of WASP-14b's Rossiter-McLaughlin effect
Rossiter-McLaughlin effect
The Rossiter–McLaughlin effect is a spectroscopic phenomenon observed when either an eclipsing binary's secondary star or an extrasolar planet is seen to transit across the face of the primary or parent star. As the main star rotates on its axis, one quadrant of its photosphere will be seen to be...

and so spin-orbit angle was that of Joshi. This is −14 ± 17 degrees. It is too eccentric for its age and so is possibly pulled into its orbit by another planet.

External links

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