HD 60532 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 84 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 Puppis

Puppis

Puppis is a constellation in the southern sky. Its name is the Latin word for the poop deck of a ship, and Puppis represents the deck of the ship and its deckhouses...

, 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 60532

HD 60532

HD 60532 is a white main sequence star located approximately 84 light-years away in the constellation of Puppis, taking its primary name from its Henry Draper Catalogue designation. It is calculated to be 1.44 times more massive than the Sun. The star is only 59% as old as our Sun and has...

. This planet has a true mass

True mass

The term true mass is synonymous with the term mass, but is used in astronomy to differentiate the measured mass of a planet from the lower limit of mass usually obtained from radial velocity techniques...

 of 3.15 times more than 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,...

 which orbits at 0.77 AU

Astronomical unit

An astronomical unit is a unit of length equal to about or approximately the mean Earth–Sun distance....

 and takes 201.83 days to revolve in an eccentric orbit. This planet was discovered on September 22, 2008 in La Silla Observatory

La Silla Observatory

La Silla Observatory is an astronomical observatory in Chile with three telescopes built and operated by the European Southern Observatory organisation, and several others are partly maintained by ESO...

 using the HARPS spectrograph. On this same day, the second planet in this system, HD 60532 c

HD 60532 c

HD 60532 c is an extrasolar planet located approximately 84 light-years away in the constellation of Puppis, orbiting the star HD 60532. This planet has a true mass of 7.46 times more than Jupiter which orbits at 1.58 AU and takes 607 days to revolve in an eccentric orbit. This planet was...

, was discovered in a 1:3 orbital resonance

Orbital resonance

In celestial mechanics, an orbital resonance occurs when two orbiting bodies exert a regular, periodic gravitational influence on each other, usually due to their orbital periods being related by a ratio of two small integers. Orbital resonances greatly enhance the mutual gravitational influence of...

.