Astronomers have located a new celestial body named WISEA 1147 and it resides in the TW Hydrae system of stars.
This planetary object is approximately 10 million years old and estimated to be roughly five to 10 times the mass of Jupiter, according to the announcement from the University of Toledo. Its classification, though, is a lightweight star called a brown dwarf instead of a planet.
NASA adds that its brown dwarf origins are more likely due to the fact that, “planets require at least 10 million years to form, and probably longer to get themselves kicked out of a star system.” Brown dwarfs form in a similar manner to stars but don’t have the mass needed to combine atoms at their cores and emit starlight needed to shine.
“We are at the beginning of what will become a hot field – trying to determine the nature of the free-floating population and how many are planets versus brown dwarfs,” said co-author Davy Kirkpatrick of NASA’s Infrared Processing and Analysis Center, or IPAC, at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, in a statement.
The research team comprised of astronomers from the University of Toledo, California Institute of Technology, and UCLA discovered WISEA 1147 after sorting through images taken with NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) and the Two Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS). Both tools sense infrared light, which is well suited for finding brown dwarfs since heat signatures light up through infrared images, according to NASA.
Ultimately, this discovery will help scientists develop a better understanding of chemical and weather compositions of these exoplanets as well as determining how they form without external factors like a host sun or accompanying planets.
The study will be published in The Astrophysics Journal.
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