*WASHINGTON - Scientists have found evidence of the first ever planetary-mass object beyond our solar system. And it’s huge!*
Probably a dozen times bigger than Jupiter, according to the researchers at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. They’re calling it a ‘rogue’ planet because it appears to be traveling through space without any kind of orbit around a parent star.
‘This object is right at the boundary between a planet and a brown dwarf, or ‘failed star,’ and is giving us some surprises that can potentially help us understand magnetic processes on both stars and planets,’ said Melodie Kao, led the study while a graduate student at Caltech, and is now a Hubble Postdoctoral Fellow at Arizona State University.
Brown dwarfs are objects too massive to be considered planets, yet not massive enough to sustain nuclear fusion of hydrogen in their cores — the process that powers stars.
Kao’s team used a radio astronomy observatory located in central New Mexico called – fittingly – the ‘Very Large Array’ (VLA) to pick up its magnetic activity and study it.