Largest Solar System Ever Discovered: A Million Years To Orbit Star

1

 

The largest solar system known to Man has been discovered. It consists of the star and a lone planet- though what it lacks for numbers, it more than makes up for in terms of sheer scale.

Its solitary gas giant revolves around it from a whopping one trillion kilometers away- 140 times further from its star than Pluto is from our Sun. Pluto, for your information, is the ninth and furthest planet from the Sun.

The planet is called 2MASS J2126-8140,  and is 12 to 15 times as massive as Jupiter- the largest planet in our solar system.

A single orbit would take nearly a million years for the planet to complete.

“We were very surprised to find such a low-mass object so far from its parent star,” said Dr Simon Murphy from the Australian National University (ANU).

“There is no way it formed in the same way as our solar system did, from a large disc of dust and gas.”

Team members discovered the lonesome twosome when they were surveying young stars and brown dwarfs that were relatively near Earth. They happened upon a planet and a star, which seemed to be about the same distance away from Earth- 100 light years. They realized that the two were extremely old, but distant, traveling companions.

“We can speculate they formed 10 million to 45 million years ago from a filament of gas that pushed them together in the same direction,” Dr Murphy explained.

Their long-distance relationship would not have been possible, had it not been for the lack of other suitably attractively well-endowed suitors.

“They must not have lived their lives in a very dense environment. They are so tenuously bound together that any nearby star would have disrupted their orbit completely.”

Sources: BBC


This Article (Largest Solar System Ever Discovered: A Million Years To Orbit Star) is free and open source. You have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with attribution to the author(CoNN) and AnonHQ.com.

CLICK HERE TO SUPPORT US VIA PATREON

Get Your Anonymous T-Shirt / Sweatshirt / Hoodie / Tanktop, Smartphone or Tablet Cover or Mug In Our Spreadshirt Shop! Click Here

 

1 COMMENT

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here