HD 208487 b is an extrasolar planet

Extrasolar planet

An extrasolar planet, or exoplanet, is a planet outside the Solar System. A total of such planets have been identified as of . It is now known that a substantial fraction of stars have planets, including perhaps half of all Sun-like stars...

 located approximately 144 light-year

Light-year

A light-year, also light year or lightyear is a unit of length, equal to just under 10 trillion kilometres...

s away in the constellation

Constellation

In modern astronomy, a constellation is an internationally defined area of the celestial sphere. These areas are grouped around asterisms, patterns formed by prominent stars within apparent proximity to one another on Earth's night sky....

 of Grus

Grus (constellation)

Grus is a constellation in the southern sky. Its name is Latin for the crane, a species of bird. It was introduced in the late sixteenth century.-History:The stars that form Grus were originally considered part of Piscis Austrinus...

, orbiting the star

Star

A star is a massive, luminous sphere of plasma held together by gravity. At the end of its lifetime, a star can also contain a proportion of degenerate matter. The nearest star to Earth is the Sun, which is the source of most of the energy on Earth...

 HD 208487

HD 208487

HD 208487 is a 7th magnitude G-type main sequence star located approximately 144 light-years away in the constellation of Grus. It has the same spectral type as our sun, G2V. However, it is probably slightly less massive and more luminous, indicating that it is slightly older...

. This planet has a minimum mass

Minimum mass

In astronomy, minimum mass is the lower-bound calculated mass of observed objects such as planets, stars and binary systems, nebulae, and black holes. Minimum mass is a widely cited statistic for extrasolar planets...

 close to half that of Jupiter

Jupiter

Jupiter is the fifth planet from the Sun and the largest planet within the Solar System. It is a gas giant with mass one-thousandth that of the Sun but is two and a half times the mass of all the other planets in our Solar System combined. Jupiter is classified as a gas giant along with Saturn,...

 and is most probably a gas giant

Gas giant

A gas giant is a large planet that is not primarily composed of rock or other solid matter. There are four gas giants in the Solar System: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune...

. The planet orbits the star in a close, eccentric orbit. One revolution takes 130 day

Day

A day is a unit of time, commonly defined as an interval equal to 24 hours. It also can mean that portion of the full day during which a location is illuminated by the light of the sun...

s to complete. This planet was discovered on September 16, 2004 by Tinney, Butler

R. Paul Butler

R. Paul Butler is an astronomer who searches for extrasolar planets.He received a BA and an MS from San Francisco State University, completing a Master's thesis with Geoffrey Marcy, and then completed his doctoral studies at the University of Maryland, College Park in 1993...

, and Marcy

Geoffrey Marcy

Geoffrey W. Marcy is an American astronomer, who is currently Professor of Astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley, famous for discovering more extrasolar planets than anyone else, 70 out of the first 100 to be discovered, along with R...

 et al. using Doppler spectroscopy

Doppler spectroscopy

Doppler spectroscopy, also known as radial velocity measurement, is a spectroscopic method for finding extrasolar planets. It involves the observation of Doppler shifts in the spectrum of the star around which the planet orbits....

 to measure the star's radial velocity

Radial velocity

Radial velocity is the velocity of an object in the direction of the line of sight . In astronomy, radial velocity most commonly refers to the spectroscopic radial velocity...

changing over time as the planet revolves around its orbit.