Found two huge planets orbiting the star HD 47366. The mass of each of them almost reaches the mass of Jupiter, the largest planet in the solar system.
It turned out that a star about 1.6 billion years old, which is located 260 light years from Earth, hides two planets. One of them has twice the mass of Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system.
Leading a team of researchers from Tokyo University of Technology, scientist Sato (Bun'ei Sato) and his colleagues discovered these two planets. Observatories and stations from different countries of the world were used to observe the star HD 47366: the Australian Astronomical Observatory, the Okayama Astrophysical Observatory in Japan, and the Xinglong Observatory Station in China.
To find hidden planets, the radial velocity method was applied, which uses gravity to detect exomers. This method is also called the Doppler Method.
When planets orbit their parent stars, they wobble. Astronomers from Tokyo, observing HD 47366, discovered them, but to do this they needed three powerful spectrographs: HIgh Dispersion Echelle Spectrograph (HIDES) from Japan, Chinese HIgh Dispersion Echelle Spectrograph (HIDES) and, of course, University College London Echelle Spectrograph (UCLES) from the Australian Observatory.
Line-of-sight velocity measurements from these spectrographs showed the presence of two exoplanets orbiting HD 47366. Using Kepler's binary model from the data obtained, scientists established the mass of objects, the semi-major axis and the eccentricity of the worlds. Each of the planets weighs almost as much as two Jupiters, that is, 1.75 and 1.86 masses, respectively. The semiaxes are 1.214 and 1.853 astronomical units, and the eccentricity (or, in other words, the "compression" of the orbit is close to the shape of an ellipse, oval) - 0.089 and 0.278.