Bangalore: Four exoplanets has been observed in the first week of New Year. For those wondering what exoplanet is? Exoplanet is an extrasolar planet which orbits around a parent star in a solar system just like the way Earth revolves round sun.

All four alien worlds, known as “hot Jupiters”, are large gas giant planets orbiting very close to their parent star. Their orbits are aligned just right with the Earth so that when they pass in front of their parent stars, they slightly dim the starlight from view, reported by Discovery News.

When these exoplanets pass in front of their parent stars, the brightness of the parent stars has been observed to be slightly faint and this phenomenon is called “transit method”. Another method is the “radical velocity method”, wherein the parent star wobbles slightly due to the    gravitational pull that comes from the exoplanet revolving around it.

This latest discovery has been done by Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics which is a ground-based telescope system. The four new exoplanets are called as HAT-P-34b, HAT-P-35b, HAT-P-36b and HAT-P-37b. These planets have very taut orbits around their parent stars and so they complete a one whole year with unimaginable speed in only 5.5-, 3.6-, 1.3- and 2.8-days respectively.

All the exoplanets encompasses rapid orbital speeds and one of them (HAT-P-34b) is noted as having extensive or elongated orbit. So far, many exoplanets are noted to exist and this year starts with the discovery of four new extrasolar planet which are considered to generate and attract many scientists to research on it.