SUMMARY: The McDonald Observatory's Hobby-Eberly Telescope has found its first extrasolar planet. The planet is 2.84 times of the mass of Jupiter, and orbits star HD 37605 every 54.23 days. The discovering team used the "radial velocity" technique, where the star's velocity toward and away from the Earth is measured to determine the mass of the planet. The observatory is well-equipped to find planets because of its High Resolution Spectrograph instrument, which can measure the composition of objects with great precision.

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