Photo: VOA
The astronomers have discovered that a planet known as 2MASS J212 is actually belongs to a galaxy.
28 Januari 2016 19:00
Brilio.net/en - A team of astronomers recently founded a largest solar system ever known so far, as reported by VOA, Wednesday (27/1).
The team, consists of American, British and Australian astronomers, have discovered that a planet known as 2MASS J212, which once thought to be a lonely free-floating planet, is actually belongs to a galaxy. It orbits about 1 trillion kilometers from its star.
That is about 7,000 times farther than the Earth is from the Sun, and 140 times larger than the orbit of Milky Ways farthest dwarf planet, Pluto.
"The planet is not quite as lonely as we first thought, but it's certainly in a very long-distance relationship," said lead author Niall Deacon of the University of Hertfordshire in England.
According to the astronomers, at that great distance, the planet takes about 900,000 years to complete a full orbit against its star.
Well, maybe it sounds impossible for the planet to hold life, if it does, the inhabitants would see their Sun as just a bright star, and might never imagine that they were connected to it at all.
Planet 2MASS J2126 was found eight years ago by US scientists in an infrared sky survey. At that time, they classified it as a young planet with a relatively low mass.
Some times later, Canadian scientists discovered that the planet was possibly a member of a 45 million-year-old group of stars and brown dwarf planets known as the Tucana Horologium Association.
That information helped the astronomers to calculate the mass of the planet, which is between 12 and 15 times that of Jupiter.
This is the widest planet system found so far, and both the members of it have been known for eight years, Deacon said. But nobody had made the link between the objects before.
Even tough 2MASS J212 is not a lonely planet, science have named some in recent years. Most of those planets are gas giants like Jupiter. They are just not solid enough to be attached to any stars.
The paper appears in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
