WASP-3b
Encyclopedia
WASP-3b 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...

 orbiting the star
Star
A star is a massive, luminous sphere of plasma held together by gravity. At the end of its lifetime, a star can also contain a proportion of degenerate matter. The nearest star to Earth is the Sun, which is the source of most of the energy on Earth...

 WASP-3
WASP-3
WASP-3 is a magnitude 10 yellow-white dwarf star located about 727 light-years away in the Lyra constellation.-Planetary system:The extrasolar planet WASP-3b was detected by the SuperWASP project in 2007....

 located over 727 light-years away in the constellation
Constellation
In modern astronomy, a constellation is an internationally defined area of the celestial sphere. These areas are grouped around asterisms, patterns formed by prominent stars within apparent proximity to one another on Earth's night sky....

 Lyra. It was discovered via 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...

 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:...

, and follow up radial velocity observations confirmed that WASP-3b is a planet. The planet's mass and radius indicate that it is a gas giant
Gas giant
A gas giant is a large planet that is not primarily composed of rock or other solid matter. There are four gas giants in the Solar System: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune...

 with a similar bulk composition to 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,...

. WASP-3b has such an orbital distance around its star to classify it in the class of planets known as hot Jupiters and has an atmospheric temperature of approximately 1983 K
Kelvin
The kelvin is a unit of measurement for temperature. It is one of the seven base units in the International System of Units and is assigned the unit symbol K. The Kelvin scale is an absolute, thermodynamic temperature scale using as its null point absolute zero, the temperature at which all...

.

In 2010, measurements of transit timing variations of the planet WASP-3b were used to infer the presence of a second planet in the system, designated WASP-3c. The discoverers note that further observations are needed to confirm the existence of this second planet.

External links

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