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Lonely Exoplanet Orbits Star From Greatest Distance Ever

By R. Siva Kumar | Update Date: Jan 27, 2016 01:29 PM EST

In the past few years, astronomers have observed that the planets in the Milky Way orbit our sun even as exoplanets orbit remote stars. But in the past few years, some lone wolves have been reported. Some exoplanets are free floating, according to EarthSky.

A team of astronomers from the U.K., U.S., and Australia find that a solitary planet that was earlier thought to be "free floating", is actually orbiting around its star.

This is the 2MASS J2126. It is about 1 trillion kilometers away from the star and is about 7,000 times the distance that the Earth is from the sun. It was located through an infrared sky survey while scientists have now found TYC 9486-927-1. This star was earlier believed to be young, with no relation with 2MASS J2126. It is traversing through space, and both are about 104 light years from the sun.

"This is the widest planet system found so far and both the members of it have been known for eight years," Niall Deacon, lead author of the study, said in a press release. "But nobody had made the link between the objects before. The planet is not quite as lonely as we first thought, but it's certainly in a very long distance relationship."

They do not seem to be part of nearby groups of young stars.

"Membership in a group of young stars is great for establishing an age," said Josh Schlieder, co-author of the study. "But when we can't use that we need to resort to other methods."

When dispersed light of the star was used to measure the strength of a feature caused by lithium and destroyed early in life, the higher amounts of lithium indicate a lower age.

Scientists found that though TYC 9486-927-1 had stronger signatures than stars that were aged more than 45 million years, they were weaker than a group of 10-million-year-old stars. It thus indicates an age link between the two. With this, the team could estimate the mass of 2MASS J2126, about 11.6 to 15 times the mass of Jupiter.

"Compared to beta Pictoris b, 2MASS J2126 is more than 700 times further away from its host star," said Simon Murphy, co-author of the study. "But how such a wide planetary system forms and survives remains an open question."

The findings were submitted to the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. on Jan. 22,2016 and the pre-print is available at arXiv.

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