A largest known solar planet, consisting of a large planet that takes nearly a million years to orbit its star, was discovered by the Astronomers.
The planet is known as the 2MASS J2126-8140 was discovered which is one trillion kilometres away, making its orbit 140 times wider than Pluto’s path around our Sun.
Highlights:
- The gas giant is between 12 and 15 times the mass of Jupiter.
- This system is nearly three times the size of the previous widest star-planet pair.
- The star and its planet were found by a survey of young stars and brown dwarfs in Earth’s neighbourhood.
Dr Simon Murphy from the Australian National University (ANU), said: “We were very surprised to find such a low-mass object so far from its parent star. There is no way it formed in the same way as our solar system did, from a large disc of dust and gas.”
Details appear in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
