Doctoral student Karen Collins from the University of Louisville and her colleagues using the Kilodegree Extremely Little Telescope (KELT) have discovered a new gas giant circling a metal-poor star.

“To participate in planet discovery here in Kentucky, it’s just incredible to me to be able to do that,” said Karen Collins, who reported the discovery today at the 222nd Meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Indianapolis.

The planet, named KELT-6b, is a hot Saturn-like gas giant. It orbits a star about the same age as our Sun in the constellation Coma Berenices some 700 light-years away.

The planet transits its host star every 7.8 days for about 5 hours.

“KELT-6b is now the longest-duration full planetary transit continuously observed from the ground,” Karen Collins said.

According to the astronomers, KELT-6b resembles the most studied exoplanet to date, HD 209458b, but differs because it was formed in an environment low in metals.

“KELT-6b is a metal-poor cousin of HD 209458b,” explained co-author Prof Keivan Stassun from Vanderbilt University.

“The role of metals in the stellar environments in which planets form is a major question in our understanding of these other worlds. This new planet is among the least endowed with such metals that we know of, and because it is so bright it should serve as a benchmark for comparative studies of how and under what conditions planets form.”

“KELT would be impossible without our network of professional and amateur observers. They do a lot of the hard slogging in surveys like this one, staying up all night to watch stars that, more often than not, turn out not to have planets,” said Thomas Beatty, a doctoral student at Ohio State University.

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Bibliographic information: Karen A. Collins et al. KELT-6b: A Transiting Mildly-Inflated Saturn with a Metal-Poor Host. 222nd AAS Meeting, Indianapolis. Presentation # 302.03