THE WEIRDEST ORBIT

HD 106906 b DISCOVERED: 2013 DETECTION METHOD:

DIRECT IMAGING

This huge planet – around 11 times the mass of Jupiter – is one of the few exoplanets to be discovered by direct imaging. It was originally found in 2013 by the Las Campanas Observatory in Chile, but it wasn’t until 2020 that details of its orbit were worked out using data collected by Hubble. It turned out to be a truly extraordinary orbit – almost 68 billion miles out from its host binary star, which is 730 times further than the distance between Earth and the Sun. This huge orbit gives the planet an incredibly long ‘year’, lasting for 15,000 Earth years.