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 |  Subject: Scientists find ‘lonely’ floating planet without a star  Sat Oct 12, 2013 6:58 am | |
| Scientists find ‘lonely’ floating planet without a staron October 12, 2013Posted In: Space Objects Ufos Unexplained Reuters / Russell CheyneAn international team of astronomers have accidentally found a ‘never before seen’ planet ‘floating’ without orbiting a star, some 80 light years away from earth. It is a mere 12 million years old, a newborn in space terms.“We have never before seen an object free-floating in space that looks like this. It has all the characteristics of young planets found around other stars, but it is drifting out there all alone,” said Michael Liu, research team leader at the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.The planet, now known as PSO J318.5-22 has a mass roughly six times that of Jupiter and was formed only 12 million years ago. While that sounds ancient, in planetary terms it is considered a mere infant.“I had often wondered if such solitary objects exist, and now we know they do,” Liu said.  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. Hundreds of extrasolar planets have been discovered since the mid-1990s. However, they are usually detected through indirect methods that rely on them orbiting a sun – the techniques measure a drop in the transmission of light as a planet passes in front of its star. Only a handful of them were directly imaged.source rtthe sith lords cometh;  |
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