Scientists Discover Young Rogue Exoplanet Drifting Alone

A rogue exoplanet had been discovered drifting within our solar system. Just 10 million years old, the giant loner was essentially young on galactic time scales. The free floating body had no star to call its own which also made it an orphan. It was discovered only 95 light-years away from Earth.

A new paper posted on the arXiv server revealed that this planet was between four to eight times the size of Jupiter, but not quite dense enough to be considered a brown dwarf, also referred to as a failed star. The celestial body was given the cacophonous name 2MASS J1119-1137 and was first seen when its strong infrared emissions were spotted by a group of astronomers led by Kendra Kellogg from the University of Western Ontario.

The rogue exoplanet had initially been ruled out by the astronomers as infrared emission from a distant, old star. Distant light from stars which crosses the space towards us were stretched by the constantly moving universe. This resulted in longer wavelengths which meant that by the time it arrived, it was often infrared shifted, according to a feature from Phys.org.

Also, masses of dust also reddened the light which gave them the appearance of planet-like bodies that naturally emitted red light at closer distances. Using the FLAMINGOS-2 spectrograph which picked apart the types of wavelengths emitted by bright bodies, the team discovered that the body was not as dense as a star, and was instead an exoplanet.

Newly-formed planets were incredibly hot due to their fiery construction process. Unlike most younger planets, the newly identified body was still noticeably hot. It emitted much more infrared light in the spectrum than it would have if it had already cooled and aged.  Kellogg said in a statement that this implied the exoplanet's very young age.

The rogue exoplanet was carefully measured on how it moved through the sky and how much light it emitted, according to a report from Arvix.org.