an effective temperature of 5647 K, Kepler-6 is cooler than the Sun. It is predicted to be 3.8 billion years old, compared to the Sun's age of 4.6 billion years. It is most notable for its unusually high metallicity for an exoplanet-bearing star; with an [Fe/H] = 0.34, Kepler-6 has 2.18 times more iron than the Sun does. Kepler-6b is the only planet that has been discovered in the orbit of Kepler-6. Characteristics Kepler-6b is a hot Jupiter, having a mass 0.669 times that of Jupiter, but an average distance of only 0.046 AU from its star and, thus, an orbital period of 3.23 days. It is almost 10 times closer to its star than Mercury is from our Sun. As a result, Kepler-6b is strongly irradiated by its star, heating its atmosphere to a temperature of 1660 K and puffing it up to a size 1.3 times that of Jupiter. It may also be the case that Kepler-6b has a thermal inversion of its atmosphere, where temperature increases with increasing distance from the center of the planet. The planet is likely to be tidally locked to the parent star. In 2015, the planetary nightside temperature was estimated to be equal to 1719 K. References External links Exoplanets discovered in 2010 Hot Jupiters Giant planets Transiting exoplanets Cygnus (constellation) 6b