Astronomers believe that they have found the largest solar system yet, where scientists first obtained a clue from this system from a lonely planet, that appears to be wandering into deep space but apparently, this planet has been orbiting its parent star from a distance of 1 trillion kilometers.
This seemingly "abandoned" planet known as 2MASS J2126-8140 was first thought to not possess a host star where scientists became surprised when they discovered that it was orbiting a red dwarf called TYC 9486-927-1. Astronomers estimate that the distance of this planet from its sun is about 7,000 times more far compared to the Earth between the sun.
The distance of this planet to its star is so massive and almost unfathomable, that in order to complete one orbit, it can take almost 1 million years. This means that one family will go through 13,000 generations before the planet experiences one full orbit of its star.
This new solar system also broke the record for the largest one to date, where the previous record holder was three times smaller than this planet's distance between its parent star.
According to Simon Murphy from the Australian National University, the team was very surprised to discover a low mass object that is incredibly far from its parent star. The team is composed of astronomers from all over the world that are investigating younger stars and brown dwarfs, lurking near our solar system.
This lonely planet, 2MASS J2126-8140, is one of the planets that the team was studying, which is also a gas giant, where it is 15 times bigger than Jupiter, which is the largest planet in the solar system. Also, this lone planet and its host star coincidentally possess the same distance from Earth, about 100 million light years away. Astronomers were able to obtain measurements of their orbits where they found this connection between each other.
Murphy and the team believes that these two were probably formed some 10 to 45 million years ago, when a gas filament forced them together into the same direction. Since the planet and the star did not exist in a very dense cosmic environment, it is possible that their fragile gravitational forces between each other can be disrupted by a nearby star, destroying their orbits completely.
This new study is published in the Monthly Notices of The Royal Astronomical Society.