New 'baby giant planet' discovered 330 light-years from Earth
2MASS 1155-7919 b orbits a sun that is 5 million years old, about 1,000 times younger than the sun.
By JERUSALEM POST STAFFNGC 4866, a lenticular galaxy, is shown in this NASA handout provided on July 19, 2013. Situated about 80 million light-years from earth, this image was captured by the Advanced Camera for Surveys, an instrument on the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope(photo credit: REUTERS/EUROPEAN SPACE AGENCY/NASA/ESA HUBBLE SPACE TELESCOPE/HANDOUT VIA REUTERS)Scientists from Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) discovered a newborn giant planet 330 light-years from Earth in the Epsilon Chamaeleontis Association, CNN reported. This planet is the closest planet of its kind to Earth and is known as a 2MASS 1155-7919 b and it is 10 times the size of Jupiter.“The dim, cool object we found is very young and only 10 times the mass of Jupiter, which means we are likely looking at an infant planet, perhaps still in the midst of formation,” Annie Dickson-Vandervelde, lead author and astrophysical sciences and technology Ph.D. student from West Columbia, S.C, said in a statement.“Though lots of other planets have been discovered through the Kepler mission and other missions like it, almost all of those are ‘old’ planets. This is also only the fourth or fifth example of a giant planet so far from its ‘parent’ star, and theorists are struggling to explain how they formed or ended up there.”2MASS 1155-7919 b orbits a sun that is 5 million years old, about 1,000 times younger than the sun, according to RIT’s statement. Additionally, the distance between the newly discovered planet and its star is 600 times the distance between Earth and the sun.RIT wrote that, while it is not currently clear how the planet is so far away from its “parent” star, the authors of the study hope that “follow-up imaging and spectroscopy” will shed more light on the mystery of how “massive planets” can have wide orbits.
