Baby Giant Planet Located Only 330 Light-Years From Our Solar System – Discovered

Eddie Gonzales Jr. – MessageToEagle.com – A newborn baby giant planet, called 2MASS 1155-7919 b, has been discovered by scientists from Rochester Institute of Technology.

Located in the Epsilon Chamaeleontis Association, only about 330 light-years from our solar system, 2MASS 1155-7919 b is located closer to Earth than any other of similarly young age found to date.

Artist's conception of a massive planet orbiting a cool, young star. In the case of the system discovered by RIT astronomers, the planet is 10 times more massive than Jupiter, and the orbit of the planet around its host star is nearly 600 times that of Earth around the sun. NASA/JPL-Caltech/R. Hurt (SSC-Caltech)Artist’s conception of a massive planet orbiting a cool, young star. In the case of the system discovered by RIT astronomers, the planet is 10 times more massive than Jupiter, and the orbit of the planet around its host star is nearly 600 times that of Earth around the sun. NASA/JPL-Caltech/R. Hurt (SSC-Caltech)

“The dim, cool object we found is very young and only 10 times the mass of Jupiter, which means we are likely looking at an infant planet, perhaps still in the midst of formation,” Annie Dickson-Vandervelde, lead author and astrophysical sciences and technology Ph.D. student from West Columbia, S.C. said in a press release.

“Though lots of other planets have been discovered through the Kepler mission and other missions like it, almost all of those are ‘old’ planets. This is also only the fourth or fifth example of a giant planet so far from its ‘parent’ star, and theorists are struggling to explain how they formed or ended up there.”

Data from the Gaia space observatory contributed to this discovery.

The giant baby planet orbits a star that is only about 5 million years old, about one thousand times younger than our sun. The planet orbits its sun at 600 times the distance of the Earth to the sun.

How this young, giant planet could have ended up so far away from its young “parent” star is a mystery. The authors hope that follow-up imaging and spectroscopy will help astronomers understand how massive planets can end up in such wide orbits.

Paper

Written by Eddie Gonzales Jr. – MessageToEagle.com Staff