Newly Discovered Planet Is As Big As Its Star

The newly discovered planet is the size of it's sun ! Then why and how do these two bodies revolve aroundeach other? The most successful technique for finding exoplanets is to locate shifts in the star's light spectrum that indicate an orbiting planet is causing the star to wobble. Our earth is smaller than the sun. If an alien was viewing our earth, will he be able to measure it's size? This method would be ineffective.

The latest exoplanet we've discovered is an imposing giant, almost the same size as the star it orbits. It's also the first planet found using a fifty-year-old technique designed to find planets at greater distances from their suns.

Steven Pravdo and Stuart Shaklan of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory led the twelve-year effort responsible for discovering the exoplanet

The planet's discovery could also change our understanding of what sorts of stars can have planetary systems. Red dwarfs are by far the most common kind of star, comprising roughly seventy percent of all stars. As more and more exoplanets are discovered around red dwarfs - and the massive size of VB 10b relative to VB 10 suggest such stars can support pretty much any kind of planet - the evidence mounts that planets are far, far more common that once was thought.

Source: io9.com...