'All By Myself': Lonely Planet Found Floating Around in Space
A recent study "provides new clues in this mystery of galactic proportions," said NASA, after scientists found a free-floating, planetary-mass object within a young star family called the TW Hydrae association.
The newly discovered planet, called WISEA 1147 for short, is thought to be up to ten times the size of Jupiter.
"The features on this one screamed out, 'I'm a young brown dwarf,' " said Adam Schneider, lead author of the study due to be published in The Astrophysical Journal.
But despite its size, tracing the origins of free-floating worlds to see if they are indeed planets or brown dwarfs is tricky — because they are so isolated and lonely.
A sky map taken by NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, shows the location of the TW Hydrae family, or association, of stars, which lies about 175 light-years from Earth and is centered in the Hydra constellation. The stars are thought to have formed together around 10 million years ago.
"We are at the beginning of what will become a very hot field — trying to determine the nature of the free-floating population and how many are planets versus brown dwarfs," co-author of the study Davy Kickpatrick of NASA's Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena said.
By studying lonely planets, like the WISEA 1147, astronomers
hope to learn more about what they're made out of — as well as weather patterns on isolated worlds. - Sputnik News
But just note what they said less than a month ago, on April 5, 2016 here:
It remains unclear just how big the distant planet would become. Given its rocky composition, it will be far smaller than gas planets like Jupiter and Saturn, but it could form to be a larger super-Earth. Orbiting within the habitable zone, it could potentially host life.
Just about two weeks later, on April 21, 2016:
The newly discovered planet, called WISEA 1147 for short, is thought to be up to ten times the size of Jupiter.Then maybe it's not so far away? "Doesn't anybody stay in one place anymore?" (With apologies to Carole King).
