A Gigantic Rogue Planet Wandering Our Galactic Neighbourhood JUST Discovered
- nemesis maturity Published on Aug 3, 2018
There is a very strange object floating around our stellar neighbourhood and it has astronomers intrigued. Astronomers using the National Science Foundation’s Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) have made a radio-telescope detection of a planetary-mass object beyond our Solar System. The object, about a dozen times more massive than Jupiter, is a surprisingly strong magnetic powerhouse and a “rogue,” traveling through space unaccompanied by any parent star. At just 20 light years from home, this marks the first planetary-mass object that has ever been detected using radio telescopy. But only just. At 12.7 times more massive than Jupiter, it’s right on the upper limit for planets – verging into brown dwarf territory. “This object is right at the boundary between a planet and a brown dwarf, or ‘failed star,’ and is giving us some surprises that can potentially help us understand magnetic processes on both stars and planets,” said astronomer Melodie Kao of Arizona State University. The research has been published in The Astrophysical Journal. http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10….
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Read more here:
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https://www.sciencealert.com/giant-ro…
https://phys.org/news/2018-08-vla-ext…
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Provided by: National Radio Astronomy Observatory;
https://public.nrao.edu/

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