WASP-17: Scientists Found New Planet Called WASP-17

New planet WASP-17 Found – The Wide Area Search for Planets, a consortium of British universities, discovered a new planet that orbits in the reverse direction as the star it revolves around. The exact opposite of every other known planet in the universe.

The new planet, WASP-17, is 1,000 light-years away from Earth and estimated to be twice the size of Jupiter, which would make WASP-17 the largest known planet in the universe.

The working theory is that WASP-17 was sent spinning in the wrong direction by a gravitational “close encounter.”

“Newly formed solar systems can be violent places,” Astronomer David Anderson of Britain’s Keele University said in a press release about the discovery his team made. “Our own moon is thought to have been created when a Mars-sized planet collided with the recently formed Earth and threw up a cloud of debris.

“A near collision during the early, violent stage of this planetary system could well have caused a gravitational slingshot, flinging WASP-17 into its backwards orbit.”

The WASP team of scientists used a battery of cameras that monitor hundreds of thousands of stars, looking for changes in light as planets pass in front of them when they made the discovery.

Thursday’s announcement drew excitement in scientific circles.

“I would have to say this is one of the strangest planets we know about,” MIT astrophysicist Sara Seager, who was not a part of the discovery team, told Space.com