Previously believed to have been a rogue planet wandering through the galaxy without having a star to orbit, the gas giant called 2MASS J2126-8140 is actually 600 billion miles (or one trillion kilometers) away from its sun, Australian National University scientists have discovered.
According to Popular Science and Space.com, the discovery makes this one-planet solar system the largest found to date, as astronomer Simon Murphy and his colleagues reported that 2MASS takes approximately 900,000 years to complete a single orbit around its host star.
To put things into perspective, the planet is approximately 7,000 astronomical units (AU) from its sun. For the sake of comparison, Neptune is about 30 AU from the sun, while Pluto’s average distance is about 40 AU and the newly discovered “Planet Nine” is at most 1,200 AU away.
False colour infrared image of TYC 9486-927-1 and 2MASS J2126. The arrows show the projected movement of the star and planet on the sky over 1000 years. The scale indicates a distance of 4000 Astronomical Units (AU), where 1 AU is the average distance between the Earth and the Sun. (Credit: 2MASS/S. Murphy/ANU)
In a statement, Dr. Niall Deacon of the University of Hertfordshire, lead author of a new study detailing the team’s findings, confirmed that this was “the widest planet system found so far and both the members of it have been known for eight years, but nobody had made the link between the objects before.”
He added that the planet “is not quite as lonely as we first thought” when it was first discovered as part of an infrared sky survey, “but it’s certainly in a very long distance relationship.”
Distance between planet and star is 6,000 times that of the Earth and Sun
Two years ago, Canadian researchers identified the planet as a potential member of the Tucana Horologium Association, a 45 million year old group of stars and brown dwarfs, meaning that it was young enough and low enough in mass to be classified as a free-floating planet.
Meanwhile, in the same region of the sky, a brown dwarf known as TYC 9486-927-1 was found and determined not to be the member of any known group of young stars. No one had considered that there might be a link between the two objects until Dr. Deacon’s team reviewed a record of known young stars and free-floating planets to see if any of them could be linked.
What they discovered was that both TYC 9486-927-1 and 2MASS J2126 were travelling through space together and that both of them were about 104 light years away from the sun. Upon further examination, they determined that the objects were between 10 and 45 million years old, and that 2MASS is a gas giant approximately 12 to 15 times bigger than Jupiter.
Previously, the greatest known distance between a planet and its star was 2,500 AU, according to the study authors, and Huffington Post UK noted that 2MASS J2126 is 6,000 times further away from TYC 9486-927-1 than the Earth is from the sun. Because of that tremendous distance, there is absolutely no way that the planet could ever support biological life, they added.
Murphy said that he and his colleagues are not sure how this type of solar system might have originally formed, but that there was “no way it formed in the same way as our solar system did, from a large disc of dust and gas.” Instead, they suspect that they formed from “a filament of gas that pushed them together in the same direction.”
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Feature Image: An artist’s impression of 2MASS J2126. (Credit: University of Hertfordshire/Neil Cook)
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