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<b>Strange New Planet Baffles Astronomers</b> <br /><br />Washington, DC - Using a network of small automated telescopes known as HAT, Smithsonian astronomers have discovered a planet unlike any other known world. This new planet, designated HAT-P-1, orbits one member of a pair of distant stars 450 light-years away in the constellation Lacerta. <br /><br />"We could be looking at an entirely new class of planets," said Gaspar Bakos, a Hubble fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA). Bakos designed and built the HAT network and is lead author of a paper submitted to the Astrophysical Journal describing the discovery. <br /><br />With a radius about 1.38 times Jupiter's, HAT-P-1 is the largest known planet. In spite of its huge size, its mass is only half that of Jupiter. <br /><br />This new discovery suggests something could be missing in our theories of how planets form." <br /><br />Any thoughts on this?<br /><br />New Planet Discovery