There’s nothing like waking up at NASA one day and realizing there’s an object orbiting Distance Star that shouldn’t be there, but that’s exactly what has happened this week.
The object circling the star is 500 light years away and is said to be eight times larger than Jupiter and according to Discovery News it breaks the laws of physics, or at least the laws scientists on Earth have developed.
If the object is a planet everything scientists known about planet formation could be taken into question, although at this time scientists are not sure that what they are seeing is in fact a planet and not another random object.
According to Discovery News:
“There is no theory for how a true planet can form at 300 AU (astronomical units, with one unit equal to 93 million miles, the mean distance between Earth and the sun). It’s not really a lack of imagination. It’s a lack of physics,” California Institute of Technology astronomer John Johnson told Discovery News.
Current theories, observations and computer models show that planets form from a disk of gas and dust that circles young stars. Less material is available as the distance to the parent star grows.
“You actually have to have material out there to have the planet forming,” Johnson said.
Another option is that the object, designated as 1RXS J160929.1-210524 b and located about 500 light-years away in the constellation Scorpius, is a new type of failed star — something akin to a brown dwarf, though about half the size — which formed along with the primary star about 5 million years ago.
But scientists similarly are at a loss to explain how such a relatively small object could have survived the stellar birthing process.
“The models show it’s difficult to successfully produce a low-mass object next to a much more massive object,” said University of Montreal astronomer David Lafreniere, who lead a team that photographed the object in 2008, the first time a planet beyond the solar system was directly imaged.
Obviously anyone can see that the star is nothing more than the headlights of a giant spaceship heading towards Earth to enslave all of use and make Tom Cruise king of the galaxy.
Either way, new objects circulating planets are a geeks dream come true, bring on the space conspiracy theories!
Orbiting Mars?? Did you read it wright?
If it’s 300 Au from our sun, thats WAY less than 500 light years away. I don’t think anything can orbit an object that’s 500 LY away from it. The link says it’s orbiting a distant star.
Aren’t there such things as drifting planets? They break loose from their orbit and float around. Or is that from star trek? I forget… But can’t this be one that got caught in another suns orbit? But I guess the chances of a planet ending up near another star are pretty bad, and it would take ages to reach that star.
What about if its orbit speed was a bit to fast and it’s slowly moving away from the star?