Can you tell me about the new planet discovered around the star 47 Ursa Majoris?

I can even show you a picture of the star extracted from the Palomar Digital Sky Survey:

The planet was discovered by Geoffrey Marcy at San Francisco State University and Paul Butler at UC Berkeley following 8 years of observations. It has a mass of 3 times that of Jupiter and orbits the star once every 1100 days at twice the distance between the Sun and the Earth. Its estimated surface temperature is about 80 K, but they speculate that somewhere in the atmosphere of this planet there may be a zone where liquid water can exist.

As more information becomes available I will update this page.


Copyright 1997 Dr. Sten Odenwald
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