We may now know why some hot Jupiters have such tight orbits Asar Studios/Alamy
The extremely short 10-day orbits of hot Jupiters may be explained by the planets being born among a high density of stars.
Hot Jupiters have long confused astrophysicists. As the name suggests, they are planets similar in size and appearance to Jupiter – but unlike Jupiter, they lie very close to their star, which means it takes them just a matter of days to complete one orbit.
Andrew Winter at Heidelberg University, Germany, and his colleagues used data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia mission…
