Scientists have discovered the largest solar system -made only by a planet and separated by a million million kilometers away-the known universe star, academic sources reported today.
“We were surprised to find an object of low mass (the planet) so far from its parent star,” said Simon Murphy School of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the Australian National University.
This academic center has an international team of researchers studying the planet known as 2MASS J2126-8140.
In its work, the team discovered that the planet, which has a mass of over twelve times that of Jupiter, orbiting a dwarf star named TYC 9486-927-1.
Both bodies are separated by a distance of 6.900 astronomical units, that is, 0.1 light year or 1,000,000,000,000 kilometers, according to a statement from the Australian National University .
That distance is “about three times larger” than the so far considered the largest solar system.
If this planet is orbiting in the solar system it would be located beyond Pluto, in the middle of the Oort cloud, within the limits of the Solar System.
The distance between the duo from the 2MASS makes the TYC 9486-927-1 J2126-8140 look like a star with moderate brightness in the sky and its light would take a month to reach the planet.
Murphy believes that giant planet has not been formed in the same way that the solar system, that is, from a large disk of dust and gas.
“We can speculate that (…) a filament gas pushed the two together in the same direction,” said Murphy.
The scientist found that the planet and star “have not lived together in a very dense environment. They are so tenuously linked to any nearby star had disturbed its orbit completely,” added the Australian expert .
The investigation of the new solar system, to be published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, was led by Niall Deacon of Britain’s University of Hertfordshire and included Joshua Schlieder of Ames Research Center of NASA.
No comments:
Post a Comment