Keele University astronomer Pierre Maxted and a team of space researchers announced this month, in the journal arXiv, that they had discovered five new exoplanets outside our solar system.

Classified as "hot Jupiters" for their orbital proximity to their parent star and being much warmer than our own Jupiter, Maxted and his space colleagues detected the distant extrasolar objects using the Wide Angle Search for Planets cameras at the South African Astronomical Observatory in Sutherland, South Africa. 

"These discoveries were made using the WASP-South instrument which has been monitoring the sky for exoplanet transits since we started operations in 2006," Maxted told weather.com in an email.

Maxted dubbed the new exoplanets WASP-119 b, WASP-124 b, WASP-126 b, WASP-129 b and WASP-133 b.

"WASP-126b is the most interesting because it orbits the brightest star of the five and the planet itself has a big radius for its mass," he added. This means it can be a target for atmospheric characterisation, deducing the composition and nature of the atmosphere from detailed study, for example with Hubble or the forthcoming James Webb Space Telescope."

(MORE: Astronomers May Have Discovered the Most Distant Object in Our Solar System)

According to Phys.org, study co-author Coel Hellier called the WASP project the "most successful" ground-based search for exoplanets.

"We have a large program which combines data from the WASP-South survey search, which has been running continually for a decade now, with large amounts of time on the Euler/CORALIE spectrograph, plus large amounts of time on the TRAPPIST robotic photometer," Hellier told Phys.org's Tomasz Nowakowski. "Thus it does require a large and coordinated program to discover these transiting exoplanets. We have now found over 100, of which these five are the latest to be announced."

Cornell astronomy professor Dong Lai told weather.com in an email that he thought the findings would be beneficial for understanding how "hot Jupiters" are formed.

"I believe that these results are interesting and important," Lai explained. "Astronomers have been studying ('hot Jupiters') for 20 years. However, their origin (how were they formed) and some of their properties (e.g., why some of them have inflated sizes) remain an enigma. The sample of 'hot Jupiters' remain relatively small. So finding more of them is important, especially finding 'hot Jupiters' with different masses. (e.g., in this study, the found a hot Saturn, with mass 0.3 of Jupiter mass, which will be helpful for future atmospheric study). All these newly discovered 'hot Jupiters' will be helpful for astronomers to figure out their formation mechanism(s)."

Since the first exoplanet discovery in 1992, there have been 2,085 confirmed identifications of extrasolar objects, according to the Extrasolar Planet Encyclopaedia

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