Feb 06, 2014 11:04 AM EST By Russell Westerholm, UniversityHerald Reporter

Analyzing data from NASA's Kepler Space Telescope, a team of scientists discovered a planet that wobbles in its orbit around a binary star system.

Named Kepler-413b, the planet precesses dramatically, varying as much as 30 degrees over the course of 11 years. Comparatively, the Earth's precession rate is 23.5 degrees over 26,000 years.

Lead researcher Veselin Kostov and his colleagues said in a press release this would make the planet's seasons so erratic, a person could need a winter coat one day and a bathing suit the next.

"Looking at the Kepler data over the course of 1,500 days, we saw three transits in the first 180 days - one transit every 66 days - then we had 800 days with no transits at all. After that, we saw five more transits in a row," Kostov, of the Space Telescope Science Institute and Johns Hopkins University, said in the release.

From Earth, Kepler-413b is seen wobbling up and down continuously. Located 2,300 light years away in the Cygnus constellation, the planet orbits a pair of red and orange dwarf stars every 66 days.

The scientists do not know exactly why the planet's orbit is wobbly, but theorize a third spatial body could be offsetting Kepler-413b's orbit. Another possibility is that other planets altered its transit previously.

"Presumably there are planets out there like this one that we're not seeing because we're in the unfavorable period," Peter McCullough, a colleague at the Space Telescope Science Institute and Johns Hopkins University, said in the release. "And that's one of the things that Veselin is researching: Is there a silent majority of things that we're not seeing?"

The Kepler Telescope was retired months ago, but scientists are still sifting through the massive amount of data the prolific telescope gathered. It spots planets by noticing the dimming of their star's light as the body moves in front of it.

Kepler-413b was spotted due to a highly irregular transit pattern. The planet is also uninhabitable, since it is about 65 times the mass of Earth and made up of gas. It also orbits far too close to its stars and would be too warm for human life.

The researcher's study is published in the Astrophysical Journal.

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