Rogue Planet Discovered Outside Solar System
Scientist found huge planetary object a dozen times bigger than Jupiter, according to the researchers at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory.
They’re calling it a ‘rogue’ planet because it appears to be travelling through space without any kind of orbit around a parent star.
This object is right at the boundary between a planet and a brown dwarf, or ‘failed star,’ and is giving us some surprises that can potentially help us understand magnetic processes on both stars and planets,’ said Melodie Kao, led the study while a graduate student at Caltech, and is now a Hubble Postdoctoral Fellow at Arizona State University.
Brown dwarfs are objects too massive to be considered planets, yet not massive enough to sustain nuclear fusion of hydrogen in their cores — the process that powers stars.
At 200 million years old and 20 light-years from Earth, the object has a surface temperature of about 825 degrees Celsius, or more than 1500 degrees Fahrenheit. By comparison, the Sun’s surface temperature is about 5,500 degrees Celsius.
Zeroing in on this new find could lead to new techniques being developed to help search for alien worlds.
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