Researchers discovered a mysterious planet thought to have been a rogue entity orbiting 600 billion miles away from a host star, according to a new report. The pair is separated by 7,000 astronomical units (AU), breaking down the measurement to 900,000 years per one orbit. To put the distance in context, one AU is the average distance from the Earth to the Sun, or about 93 million miles.
From an alternative vantage, Neptune lies about 30 AU from the Sun; Pluto about 40 AU from our star; and the recent novelty, Planet Nine, never orbits more than 600 to 1,200 AU away from the sun. The study, published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, led by Niall Deacon of the University of Hertfordshire, said,”The planet is not quite as lonely as we first thought, but it’s certainly in a very long-distance relationship.”
The previous record held for the largest distance between a planet and its host star was 2,500 AU. Deacon and his consortium analyzed databases of these rogue planets—planets without a parent star—and brown dwarfs—entities larger than planets but too small to ignite fusion reactions necessary to power stars—to gauge if they could connect the dots in any way. The researchers discovered 2MASS J2126 eight years ago, and a what’s known as a red dwarf star labeled TYC 9486-927-1, were linked floating through space together roughly 104 light-years from Earth, suggesting they’re part of the same solar system.
And an approximate age of 10 million to 45 million years old was deduced for TYC 9486-927-1 and 2MASS J2126 using lithium signatures in the star’s spectrum. Lithium as the invariable is used because the compound is destroyed early in the formation of a star. The more lithium, the younger the star. In other words, 2MASS J2126 has completed a maximum of 50 orbits around its host star so far.
With this information, scientists calculated an approximate mass of the planet, about 12 to 15 times that of Jupiter. Previous estimations of 2MASS J2126’s temperature were about 2,730 degrees Fahrenheit. The system’s characteristics conjure up Beta Pictoris b, but 2MASS J2126 orbits its star 700 times farther from its sun than Pictoris b.