A Glowing Rogue Planet Was Spotted Drifting Near Our Solar System
In 2016, scientists stumbled upon a massive object just beyond our solar system, which they believed was a ‘failed’ brown dwarf star. Now, a paper published in the Astrophysical Journal has reclassified it as a rogue planet and it’s got some pretty bizarre characteristics.
Given the rather boring, scientific moniker SIMP J01365663+0933473, this newly classified planet is just below the threshold of brown-dwarfdom, typically set at 13 times the size of Jupiter. Weighing in at a mere 12.7 times the size of Jupiter, this mega-planet also has a magnetic field 200 times stronger than the gas giant we know. And it’s floating through space, untethered to any star.
Scientists observed some bright and powerful auroras near the planet’s polar regions due to its intense magnetic field – think the Northern Lights like you’ve never seen them before. This happens when charged solar particles bombard the planet, before being ionized by its magnetosphere.
The planet is relatively young, about 200 million years-old, and is drifting about 20 light-years away from us – a relatively short distance on a cosmic scale.
Artist’s representation of SIMP Credit:Credit: Caltech/Chuck Carter; NRAO/AUI/NSF
Sometimes rogue planets can become “captured” by another star and join the ranks of its solar system. This planet is currently being pulled by the gravitational force at our galactic center, but if it came close enough to our sun it could be sucked into its gravitational pull. In this scenario, a rogue planet might find itself crashing into other planets in our neighborhood, knocking into them like a pool cue and causing mass chaos.
This is unlikely to happen with SIMP, but scientists believe there could be a multitude of these rogue planets floating through the galaxy and occasionally wreaking havoc on unsuspecting solar systems, ahem, Nibiru?
The discovery of SIMP came about through the detection of its strong auroral radio emissions and scientists hope to use this method to discover more rogue planets. It would have been nearly impossible to have detected it otherwise, due to its lack of a parent star.
As we find more of these rogue planets in our cosmic region, it will hopefully tell us more about our place in the galaxy and what our future trajectory looks like. This prospect is exciting as long as we don’t find ourselves on a terminal collision course.
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What's Sending These Mystery Signals From 4,000 Lightyears Away?
A mysterious repeating radio signal from space has been detected that scientists have not seen before. What or who is sending this signal?
Scientists have detected a radio signal from somewhere out in deep space some 4,000 light-years away.
The signal pulsed every 18 minutes and 18 seconds, for 30 to 60 seconds — every time, 18 minutes and 18 seconds. It did this for three months then it stopped. Scientists assume it is a naturally occurring rotating object that, like a lighthouse shining its beacon, will send what appears to be a repeating signal.
But Natasha Hurley-Walker, whose study into this repeating signal was recently published in the journal Nature told Vice, “[T]here are no models that produce such bright radio emission from two objects in orbit with each other, with such precision, and any that would produce any kind of radio waves would also produce X-ray emission, which we don’t see.”
Some think this might be coming from a highly magnetized star called a magnetar. So what does this all mean? Astronomer and Gaia News contributor Marc D’Antonio weighed in on the subject.
“Maybe this strange signal is some weird kind of magnetar that is rotating, but we’re not used to seeing it rotate every 18 minutes, that means a rather slow rotation. So, this is kind of weird, it’s something that doesn’t match any model that we know, and I think it takes us down a new research path to try to figure out just what it is we’re looking at,” D’Antonio said.
