Lonely planet found wandering

ZeRoY

Lonely planet found wandering a mere 80 light years from Earth

Astronomers say discovery of 12m-year-old free-floating planet will provide view into inner workings of gas giants like Jupiter



Astronomers have found a planet, a mere 80 light years from Earth, that is wandering the heavens alone. The free-floating planet, named PSO J318.5-22, is a gas giant with six times the mass of Jupiter and is a relative newborn as far as planets go, having formed only 12 million years ago.

"We have never before seen an object free-floating in space that that looks like this. It has all the characteristics of young planets found around other stars, but it is drifting out there all alone," said Michael Liu of the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, who helped to find the planet. "I had often wondered if such solitary objects exist, and now we know they do."

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emo72

i never knew that there was planets out in "the dark" between star systems. wonder what else is out there that we havent seen yet? wonder if any of the voyagers are heading in that direction?

Fox_In_Socks

How did they detect it? I thought that it was the wobbling of the star around which planets rotated was the sign of planets tugging at it?

Captain Chaos

Fox_In_Socks wrote: »

How did they detect it? I thought that it was the wobbling of the star around which planets rotated was the sign of planets tugging at it?

Seeing as it's so close, relatively at 80ly, it may have been blocking out very distant stars behind it as it passed along the field of view.

ireland.man

Fox_In_Socks wrote: »

How did they detect it? I thought that it was the wobbling of the star around which planets rotated was the sign of planets tugging at it?

Its heat signature was directly imaged. It was discovered accidentally by researchers who were searching for brown dwarfs.