scientist have reveal a planet a lot like Jupiter orbit a dim whiz , if you could even call it a star — it ’s nothing like our sun . The finding once again make us enquire : what is a major planet , anyway ?
A team of researchers from two collaborations , KMTNet and the OGLE , or Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment , announced their new planet - brown dwarf pair , squall it the “ OGLE-2017 - BLG-1522 microlensing event . ” dark-brown dwarfs are either the light , dimmest stars or the heaviest , hottest planets . They have been spotted with companions before , but this would be largest slew difference between a brown midget and its companion yet , with the brown dwarf being perhaps over 60 time the sizing of the orbit satellite .
“ OGLE-2017 - BLG-1522Lb could be the first giant planet orbiting around a brown - midget host experience a planetal mass proportion , ” the authors write inthe paperpublished on the arXiv preprint host .
That mean that the planet could have form from a ring of debris around the brown gnome , rather than the two objects forming together as a sort of binary . “ That ’s the fundamental dubiousness , ” Jennifer Yee , astrophysicist at the Harvard - Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics , tell Gizmodo . “ That ’s why it ’s important . We do n’t make love how you would form these thing , ” she said , referring to planets orbit dark-brown dwarfs .
The OGLE discovered the object on August 7 , 2017 , using their Warsaw telescope in Chile . Another web of scope in Chile , South Africa , and Korea , called the Korea Microlensing Telescope web Survey , also monitored the event .
Essentially , the research worker go out another star , site behind the browned dwarf and major planet , brighten in a characteristic pattern , one most likely due to the pair occur in front of it . The gravity from the closer objects would bend the light of the whizz behind them . The research worker attributed their issue to a planet around three - quarter the sight of Jupiter orbiting a brown dwarf 46 or so times the mass of Jupiter . They calculated that the two are sort out by about 0.6 times the distance between the Earth and the Sun .
This new composition has n’t been published in its equal - reviewed form yet , and has some pretty gravid uncertainties ; for example , the paper includes the line “ the chance that the boniface is a brown midget is [ approximately ] 76 % . ” We ’ll update this post with further comment when we hear back .
But the event brings up yet again the public debate about what constitutes a “ planet ” and what doesn’t — a redefinition of the term planet stripped Pluto of its title of respect , you might recall . It ’s specially difficult to see out the difference on the laboured remainder of affair , though , when something is too self-aggrandising to be call a planet and just monumental enough to become a principal . How something form is of essential grandness to understanding whether something is a planet or not , since planet lean to constitute from disks around stars , while stars mold from the centers of the disks themselves .
Given the uncertainty , there ’s still lots more research to be done , said Yee , since we ca n’t see the whole process from kickoff to finish . “ By rule a bunch of these thing , we can come to them back to the whole corse of their phylogeny , ” she say .
[ arXiv ]
AstronomyAstrophysicsScience
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