A Strange Lonely Planet Found Without a Star

Jay Stevens cited sciencedaily.com


hanson wrote:
"Cool" story, that free-floating orphan/hermit planet.
Is there any data yet in which direction it moves?

Towards us, or away? Objects like that make great
subjects for the FUD masters, here in s.p. One of
those may swing by & gulp-up earth like Jupiter
swallowed the Shoemaker comet, & it may cause a
brief but intense and TRUE Climate change and
global warming, big time, to the chagrin of all Green
****s and Enviro turds. Pity...
Right, Sam & Desertphool?

Jay Stevens reprorted:
A Strange Lonely Planet Found Without a Star
sciencedaily.com

Oct. 9, 2013 - 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.

"We have never before seen an object free-floating in
space that that looks like this. It has all the
characteristics of young planets found around other
stars, but it is drifting out there all alone," explained
team leader Dr. Michael Liu of the Institute for
Astronomy at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. "I had
often wondered if such solitary objects exist, and now we
know they do."

During the past decade, extrasolar planets have been
discovered at an incredible pace, with about a thousand
found by indirect methods such as wobbling or dimming of
their host stars induced by the planet. However, only a
handful of planets have been directly imaged, all of
which are around young stars (less than 200 million years
old). PSO J318.5-22 is one of the lowest-mass free-
floating objects known, perhaps the very lowest. But its
most unique aspect is its similar mass, color, and energy
output to directly imaged planets.

"Planets found by direct imaging are incredibly hard to
study, since they are right next to their much brighter
host stars. PSO J318.5-22 is not orbiting a star so it
will be much easier for us to study. It is going to
provide a wonderful view into the inner workings of gas-
giant planets like Jupiter shortly after their birth,"
said Dr. Niall Deacon of the Max Planck Institute for
Astronomy in Germany and a co-author of the study.

PSO J318.5-22 was discovered during a search for the
failed stars known as brown dwarfs. Due to their
relatively cool temperatures, brown dwarfs are very faint
and have very red colors. To circumvent these
difficulties, Liu and his colleagues have been mining the
data from the PS1 telescope. PS1 is scanning the sky
every night with a camera sensitive enough to detect the
faint heat signatures of brown dwarfs. PSO J318.5-22
stood out as an oddball, redder than even the reddest
known brown dwarfs.

"We often describe looking for rare celestial objects as
akin to searching for a needle in a haystack. So we
decided to search the biggest haystack that exists in
astronomy, the dataset from PS1," said Dr. Eugene Magnier
of the Institute for Astronomy at the University of
Hawaii at Manoa and a co-author of the study. Dr. Magnier
leads the data processing team for PS1, which produces
the equivalent of 60,000 iPhone photos every night. The
total dataset to date is about 4,000 Terabytes, bigger
than the sum of the digital version of all the movies
ever made, all books ever published, and all the music
albums ever released.

The team followed up the PS1 discovery with multiple
telescopes on the summit of Mauna Kea on the island of
Hawaii. Infrared spectra taken with the NASA Infrared
Telescope Facility and the Gemini North Telescope showed
that PSO J318.5-22 was not a brown dwarf, based on
signatures in its infrared light that are best explained
by it being young and low-mass.

By regularly monitoring the position of PSO J318.5-22
over two years with the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope,
the team directly measured its distance from Earth. Based
on this distance, about 80 light-years, and its motion
through space, the team concluded that PSO J318.5-22
belongs to a collection of young stars called the Beta
Pictoris moving group that formed about 12 million years
ago. In fact, the eponymous star of the group, Beta
Pictoris, has a young gas-giant planet in orbit around
it. PSO J318.5-22 is even lower in mass than the Beta
Pictoris planet and probably formed in a different
fashion.

The discovery paper of PSO J318.5-22 is being published
by Astrophysical Journal Letters and is available at
http://arxiv.org/abs/1310.0457. The other key authors of
the paper are Katelyn Allers (Bucknell University), Trent
Dupuy (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics), and
Michael Kotson and Kimberly Aller (University of Hawaii
at Manoa).

Story Source:
The above story is based on materials provided by
Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawaii at
Manoa.
Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.
Journal Reference:
More at:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases...1009153455.htm