This past November, astronomers using ESO’s Very Large Telescope and the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope identified
a body that is very probably a planet wandering through space without a
parent star. These worlds could be common — perhaps as numerous as
normal stars. This is the most exciting free-floating planet candidate so far and the closest such object to the Solar System at a distance of about 100 light-years.
Its comparative proximity, and the absence of a bright star very close
to it, has allowed the team to study its atmosphere in great detail.
This object also gives astronomers a preview of the exoplanets that
future instruments aim to image around stars other than the Sun.
“Looking for planets around their stars is akin to studying a firefly
sitting one centimetre away from a distant, powerful car headlight,”
says Philippe Delorme (Institut
de planétologie et d’astrophysique de Grenoble, CNRS/Université Joseph
Fourier, France), lead author of the study. “This nearby free-floating
object offered the opportunity to study the firefly in detail without
the dazzling lights of the car messing everything up.”
Free-floating planets are planetary-mass objects that
roam through space without any ties to a star. Possible examples of
such objects have been found before, but without knowing their ages, it
was not possible for astronomers to know whether they were really
planets or brown dwarfs — “failed” stars that lack the bulk to trigger
the reactions that make stars shine.
These rogue objects started to become known in the 1990s, when
astronomers found that the point at which a brown dwarf crosses over
into the planetary mass range is difficult to determine. More recent
studies have suggested that there may be huge numbers of these little
bodies in our galaxy, a population numbering almost twice as many as the
main sequence stars present.
But astronomers discovered an object, labelled CFBDSIR2149, that
seems to be part of a nearby stream of young stars known as the AB Doradus Moving Group. The object was identified as part of an infrared extension of the Canada-France Brown Dwarfs Survey
(CFBDS), a project hunting for cool brown dwarf stars. The researchers
found the object in observations from the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope
and harnessed the power of ESO’s Very Large Telescope to examine its
properties.
The AB Doradus Moving Group is the closest such group to the Solar
System. Its stars drift through space together and are thought to have
formed at the same time. If the object is associated with this moving
group — and hence it is a young object — it is possible to deduce much
more about it, including its temperature, mass, and what its atmosphere
is made of. There remains a small probability that the association with
the moving group is by chance.
The association with the AB Doradus Moving Group would pin down the
mass of the planet to approximately 4–7 times the mass of Jupiter, with
an effective temperature of approximately 430 degrees Celsius. The
planet’s age would be the same as the moving group itself — 50 to 120
million years.
The link between the new object and the moving group is the vital
clue that allows astronomers to find the age of the newly discovered
object. This is the first isolated planetary mass object ever identified
in a moving group, and the association with this group makes it the
most interesting free-floating planet candidate identified so far.
The team’s statistical analysis of the object’s proper motion — its
angular change in position across the sky each year — shows an 87%
probability that the object is associated with the AB Doradus Moving
Group, and more than 95% probability that it is young enough to be of
planetary mass, making it much more likely to be a rogue planet rather
than a small “failed” star. More distant free-floating planet candidates
have been found before in very young star clusters, but could not be
studied in detail.
Free-floating objects like CFBDSIR2149 are thought to form either as
normal planets that have been booted out of their home systems, or as
lone objects like the smallest stars or brown dwarfs. In either case
these objects are intriguing — either as planets without stars, or as
the tiniest possible objects in a range spanning from the most massive
stars to the smallest brown dwarfs.
“These objects are important, as they can either help us understand
more about how planets may be ejected from planetary systems, or how
very light objects can arise from the star formation process,” says
Philippe Delorme. “If this little object is a planet that has been
ejected from its native system, it conjures up the striking image of
orphaned worlds, drifting in the emptiness of space.”
If CFBDSIR2149 is not associated with the AB Doradus Moving Group it
is trickier to be sure of its nature and properties, and it may instead
be characterised as a small brown dwarf. Both scenarios represent
important questions about how planets and stars form and behave.
“Further work should confirm CFBDSIR2149 as a free-floating planet,”
concludes Philippe Delorme. “This object could be used as a benchmark
for understanding the physics of any similar exoplanets that are
discovered by future special high-contrast imaging systems, including
the SPHERE instrument that will be installed on the VLT.”
This research is presented in a paper, “CFBDSIR2149-0403: a 4-7 Jupiter-mass free-floating planet in the young moving group AB Doradus?” in Astronomy & Astrophysics.
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