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A Strange Lonely Planet Found without a Star [merged]


Waspie_Dwarf

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A Strange Lonely Planet Found without a Star

An international team of astronomers has discovered an exotic young planet that is not orbiting a star. This free-floating planet, dubbed PSO J318.5-22, is just 80 light-years away from Earth and has a mass only six times that of Jupiter. The planet formed a mere 12 million years ago—a newborn in planet lifetimes.

It was identified from its faint and unique heat signature by the Pan-STARRS 1 (PS1) wide-field survey telescope on Haleakala, Maui. Follow-up observations using other telescopes in Hawaii show that it has properties similar to those of gas-giant planets found orbiting around young stars. And yet PSO J318.5-22 is all by itself, without a host star.

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Are they absolutely sure it isn't an alien invasion come to take our star from us?

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A planet space ship. Like Unicron!

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http://io9.com/astronomers-say-theyve-found-a-rogue-planet-with-no-su-1443571329

A planet six times more massive than Jupiter has been spotted drifting, cold and alone, eighty light years from Earth. It's a sunless world, and astronomers say it could be the first real example of a free-floating planet to date. But how it got separated from its parent star in the first place remains a mystery.

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