October 12, 2013

Rogue Planet

Astronomers have discovered another exo-planet. However, PSO J318.5-22 is a bit different from most....this planet is not orbiting any star. It is an orphan gas giant that was either cast into space or somehow formed alone.



The very VERY cold body is 80 light years away.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 12:04 PM | Comments (8) | Add Comment
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1 Failed star?

Posted by: Mauser at Sat Oct 12 17:19:38 2013 (TJ7ih)

2

Very much. Sounds like a brown dwarf, a category of object which amounts to "failed star". They form the same way stars do but don't have enough mass to ignite. They radiate infrared, but it's all energy from the formation process. 

 

 

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Sat Oct 12 20:18:10 2013 (+rSRq)

3 Sounds like it's below the usual size limit for a brown dwarf - brown dwarf stars are large enough to fuse deuterium, but too small to run the main-sequence carbon cycle.  The cutoff is about 13x the mass of Jupiter, and this is about 6x.

A recent discovery is that there seems to be rather a lot of rogue planets out there, anything from a trillion to perhaps many quadrillion wandering about the Milky Way.

And it may not be cold at all.  Just guessing, but at 6x the mass of Jupiter and only 12 million years old, it's probably still several hundred degrees in your temperature scale of choice.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sat Oct 12 21:01:28 2013 (PiXy!)

4 A universe full of rogue planets might account for the "Missing mass".  So much for "Dark Matter".

Posted by: Mauser at Sun Oct 13 02:31:17 2013 (TJ7ih)

5 Well, dark matter is just matter that happens to be dark.  If it's rogue planets, though, there has to be a lot of them, and they have to be mostly very very cold; I'm not sure if that fits in with astronomical data.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sun Oct 13 06:38:23 2013 (PiXy!)

6 Andre Norton said that rogue planets and asteroids drifting in interstellar space are where the smugglers hang out.

Of course, it could just be that somebody's disintegration ray did a very thorough job on the star, or that the planet was the only thing flung out of a black hole that ate its original system, or....

Posted by: Suburbanbanshee at Sun Oct 13 12:45:46 2013 (cvXSV)

7 If it ain't in orbit around a star, it ain't a planet.  Sounds more like a "sub-stellar object".  Speaking of which, apparently the Oort Cloud isn't considered to be part of the solar system anymore?  Since Voyager isn't even part-way through the Cloud, which pretty much starts at the heliopause?

Posted by: Mitch H. at Mon Oct 14 13:13:01 2013 (jwKxK)

8 There is some discussion on the breaking point between a brown dwarf and a gas giant. The article indicates that this is well below that zone of fuzzieness. 
RE: Voagyer leaving the solsar system was actually a discovey. It turns out that the heliopause is on this side of the Oort cloud. The characteristics of interstellar space were thought to be quite different from planetary space. Voyager discovered that was true thus confirming the associated theory and locating the heliopause...at least in the direction Votager is flying.
I guess the Oort cloud orbits the solar system. I suppose given it's origin and the fact that it's influenced the sun's gravity that its considered part of the SS but it is in interstellar space.

I'm guessing that there is much discussion of this in the NASA nomenclature situation room.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Mon Oct 14 14:09:19 2013 (DnAJl)

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