XO-6b is a transiting

exoplanet An exoplanet or extrasolar planet is a planet outside the Solar System. The first confirmed detection of an exoplanet was in 1992 around a pulsar, and the first detection around a main-sequence star was in 1995. A different planet, first det ...

, orbiting the star XO-6 around 760

light years A light-year, alternatively spelled light year (ly or lyr), is a unit of length used to express astronomical distances and is equal to exactly , which is approximately 9.46 trillion km or 5.88 trillion mi. As defined by the International Astro ...

(230

parsec The parsec (symbol: pc) is a unit of length used to measure the large distances to astronomical objects outside the Solar System, approximately equal to or (AU), i.e. . The parsec unit is obtained by the use of parallax and trigonometry, and ...

s) away from Earth. It was discovered in 2016 by the XO planet search team.

Characteristics

XO-6b is classified as a

hot Jupiter Hot Jupiters (sometimes called hot Saturns) are a class of gas giant exoplanets that are inferred to be physically similar to Jupiter (i.e. Jupiter analogue, Jupiter analogues) but that have very short orbital periods (). The close proximity to t ...

. The planet has an orbital period of just 3.8 days and an average orbital separation of 0.082

astronomical unit The astronomical unit (symbol: au or AU) is a unit of length defined to be exactly equal to . Historically, the astronomical unit was conceived as the average Earth-Sun distance (the average of Earth's aphelion and perihelion), before its m ...

s. As of such, it is highly irradiated, with a surface temperature estimated to be around . The planet's mass is estimated at . The discovery paper suggested a very large radius of , which would make it among the largest known exoplanets, but more recent papers, considering the measurements of the host star's distance by the Gaia satellite, found the radius to be smaller, at around .

Host star

XO-6b orbits XO-6, a faint 10th magnitude star in the constellation

Camelopardalis Camelopardalis is a large but faint constellation of the northern sky representing a giraffe. The constellation was introduced in 1612 or 1613 by Petrus Plancius. Some older astronomy books give Camelopardalus or Camelopardus as alternative form ...

. Due to its magnitude, this star is too faint to be seen with the naked eye, but can be seen with a telescope. XO-6 is a

F-type main-sequence star An F-type main-sequence star (F V) is a main-sequence, hydrogen-fusing star of spectral type F and luminosity class V. These stars have from 1.0 to 1.4 times the mass of the Sun and surface temperatures between 6,000 and 7,600 K.Tables ...

with about 1.30 times the

mass of the Sun The solar mass () is a frequently used unit of mass in astronomy, equal to approximately . It is approximately equal to the mass of the Sun. It is often used to indicate the masses of other stars, as well as stellar clusters, nebulae, galaxies a ...

. It is also radiating three times as bright, and is 1.4 times the size of the Sun. It is also hotter, with a temperature of , which gives it the typical hue of an F-type star. Unlike most other stars of its kind, XO-6 rotates rapidly at a rate of 43 km/s.

Characteristics

Host star

References

Further reading