Extra-solar 'planet' an optical illusion

16:34 05 September 02
NewScientist.com news service

One of the 100 or so planets discovered orbiting stars outside the
Solar System does not exist after all.

Astronomers have realised that what appeared to be a Jupiter-sized
planet is actually a giant sunspot rotating around the surface of the
star. But they do not expect many other planets will turn out to be
bogus, because this case involves a particularly young star.

The phantom planet was thought to orbit HD 192262, a young star 63 light years from Earth. In 1999, at team at the University of California at Santa Cruz discovered a shift in the spectrum of light emitted by the star. They concluded that a large planet must be orbiting the star, causing the shift, and announced its discovery.

But now further observations conducted by Gregory Henry of Tennessee State University and Robert Donahue and Sallie Baliunas of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics show they were duped.