A Qatar-led international team has made its first find in its search for planets orbiting distant stars.

It has found a huge gas giant, 20 per cent larger than Jupiter that orbits a star 500 light years away, according to a report in our sister newspaper Gulf Daily News.

The planet has been named Qatar-1b and its discovery is to be reported in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, the Qatar Foundation for Education, Science and Community Development said yesterday.

Qatar-1b circles its star once every 1.4 days, meaning that its ‘year’ is just 34 hours long.