The giant planet 2MASS J2126-8140 appeared to be a solitary body roaming free in the universe, but an international team of astronomers has just discovered that it orbits a star that is a trillion kilometers apart, 7,000 times farther than the planet. that exists between the Earth and the Sun. These data make the duo the most extensive solar system ever found.
To give you an idea of what we say, let’s go with a few numbers: the planet (which is between 11.6 and 15 times the mass of Jupiter) takes almost a million Earth years to complete the orbit around its sun, and it is estimated that since it exists it will have made that journey about 50 times.
Astronomer Simon Murphy, from the Australian National University and one of the authors of the finding, believes that this planet could have formed in another system or by itself, to end up being trapped by the star, but he also speculates that both bodies could have been born ” between 10 and 45 million years ago, from a gas filament that put them in the same direction. “
When scientists found 2MASS J2126-8140 in 2008, they thought it was just another member of a group of stars and brown dwarfs – bodies with an intermediate mass between giant planets and low-mass stars – 45 million years old, but After observing several thousand young stars and brown dwarfs near our solar system, Murphy and his colleagues noticed that 2MASS J2126-8140 and its star – a red dwarf named TYC9486-927-1 – were moving together through space, about 104 light years from us, and that they were not part of any system.
According to Murphy, what makes this celestial object so interesting is that it is located on the border between planets and brown stars, so knowing the secrets of its origin could provide important information about the formation of both.
Image: Artist’s recreation of the planet 2MASS J2126-8140 (University of Hertfordshire / Neil Cook).
