A pair of strange new worlds that blur the boundaries between planets and stars have been discovered beyond our Solar System. A few dozen such objects have been identified in recent years but this is the first set of "twins". Dubbed "planemos", they circle each other rather than orbiting a star. Their existence challenges current theories about the formation of planets and stars, astronomers report in the journal Science. "This is a truly remarkable pair of twins - each having only about 1% the mass of our Sun," said Ray Jayawardhana of the University of Toronto, co-author of the Science paper. "Its mere existence is a surprise, and its origin and fate a bit of a mystery." The pair belongs to what some astronomers believe is a new class of planet-like objects floating through space; so-called planetary mass objects, or "planemos", which are not bound to stars.They appear to have been forged from a contracting gas cloud, in a similar way to stars, but are much too cool to be true stars.

And while they have similar masses to many of the giant planets discovered beyond our Solar System (the largest weighs in at 14 times the mass of Jupiter and the other is about seven times more massive), they are not thought to be true planets either. "We are resisting the temptation to call it a 'double planet' because this pair probably didn't form the way that planets in our Solar System did," said co-researcher Valentin Ivanov of the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Santiago, Chile.

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very interesting, i wonder if they will collide.

Why would they, any more than the Moon colliding with the Earth?

How the hell did they discovered them? I thought the star wobbling was the only way to find planets until that new telescope was in place n kicking...

The reason it's hard to spot most exoplanets is that the light they emit is lost in the glare of a parent star. It's like trying to spot a candle next to some stadium spotlights.

These sub-brown dwarfs don't have the problem of a bright parent star to contend with. In fact they were actually first analyzed in optical and near-infrared wavelengths (in what's called the optical I-band).

The full European Southern Observatory press release about this discovery has now been posted in the Space and Astronomy forum: HERE

Bummer!! My spell checker still isn't working!! Be prepaired people, my spelling totally sucks!

Woo Hoo!! Twin Brown dwarfs!

The universe NEVER seaces to totally amaze me!! 7 times larger than Jupiter?! Man thats HUGE!

Isn't it great when new things are discovered? New worlds, new species of animals, getting holes in old theories, and the list is getting longer. Part of me finds it amusing that so many "facts" are unraveling. Shows that not only regular people never stops learning something new everyday.