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In our solar system, Jupiter is by far the largest planet. Jupiter is twice the mass of Saturn and 300 times the mass of Earth. As big as Jupiter is, scientists have now discovered a distant planet that is even bigger. The distant planet is called Kepler-88d and is three times the mass of Jupiter.
The discovery of the planet was based on six years of data recorded at the Keck Observatory in Hawaii. The team confirmed that Kepler-88 d orbits its star every four years. The planet has an elliptical orbit and is the most massive planet in your system.
The Kepler-88 system is already the focus of study for two other planets that have been discovered there called Kepler-88 b and c. Those planets were famous for a strange dynamics called medium motion resonance. Planet b is smaller than Neptune and orbits the star in just 11 days. That’s half the 22-day orbital period for planet C, which is a Jupiter-mass planet.
An interesting phenomenon at play in the system has to do with drastic changes in the orbital time of the inner planet. Those changes are called transit time variations, and the precise times when Kepler-88 b crosses between the star and the telescope can go up to half a day sooner or later.
The discovery of the new planet in the system adds another degree of understanding of why the transit of the inner planets varies so widely. The extremely massive planet Kepler-88 d is presumably more influential in the history of its system than Kepler-88 c, which is the size of Jupiter. In our solar system, Jupiter was influential in the development of other planets, including Earth.
