HD 24040 b is a long-period exoplanet taking approximately 3500 days to orbit at 4.6

astronomical unit The astronomical unit (symbol: au, or or AU) is a unit of length, roughly the distance from Earth to the Sun and approximately equal to or 8.3 light-minutes. The actual distance from Earth to the Sun varies by about 3% as Earth orbits ...

s in an almost circular orbit. It has a

minimum mass In astronomy, minimum mass is the lower-bound calculated mass of observed objects such as planets, stars and binary systems, nebulae, and black holes. Minimum mass is a widely cited statistic for extrasolar planets detected by the radial veloci ...

4 times that of

Jupiter Jupiter is the fifth planet from the Sun and the largest in the Solar System. It is a gas giant with a mass more than two and a half times that of all the other planets in the Solar System combined, but slightly less than one-thousandth t ...

Discovery

HD 24040b was discovered in 2006 based on observations made at the

W. M. Keck Observatory The W. M. Keck Observatory is an astronomical observatory with two telescopes at an elevation of 4,145 meters (13,600 ft) near the summit of Mauna Kea in the U.S. state of Hawaii. Both telescopes have aperture primary mirrors, and when comp ...

Hawaii Hawaii ( ; haw, Hawaii or ) is a state in the Western United States, located in the Pacific Ocean about from the U.S. mainland. It is the only U.S. state outside North America, the only state that is an archipelago, and the only state ...

. However, because the observations covered less than one complete orbit there were only weak constraints on the period and mass. The first reliable orbit for HD 24040b was obtained by astronomers at

Haute-Provence Observatory The Haute-Provence Observatory (OHP, french: Observatoire de Haute-Provence) is an astronomical observatory in the southeast of France, about 90 km east of Avignon and 100 km north of Marseille. It was established in 1937 as a national ...

in 2012 who combined the keck measurements with ones from the SOPHIE and

ELODIE spectrograph ELODIE was an echelle spectrograph installed on the 1.93m reflector at the Observatoire de Haute-Provence in south-eastern France. Its optical instrumentation was developed by André Baranne from the Marseille Observatory. The purpose of the instr ...

s. The most recent orbit published in 2015 added additional keck measurements and refined the orbital parameters.

References

External links

* Giant planets Taurus (constellation) Exoplanets discovered in 2006 Exoplanets detected by radial velocity {{extrasolar-planet-stub