Astronomers have recently announced the discovery of a new planet that’s so gigantic; astronomers aren’t sure whether it even qualifies as a planet.
The discovery of the supermassive alien world dubbed OGLE-2016-BLG-1190Lb was announced after scientists used NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope to spot it.
The planet is so big that astronomers aren’t sure how it even exists. The alien world is estimated to be more than13 times the mass of Jupiter. It is so big that experts are wondering whether or not it’s possible that is in fact a sort of failed star, despite the fact that it orbits its own sun.
Now, and for some reason which many don’t understand, Nibiru ended up in this story.
As reported by the Mirror, the discovery of the massive world has fueled speculation among doomsayers that the planet in question could be Nibiru, or Planet X, a mysterious alien world the will allegedly cause the end of times.
Believers behind the Nibiru doomsday theory suggest how the rogue alien world is hurtling through outer space and will appear in our skies at any moment.
But, let’s get back to basics.
As explained by Phys.org, its nowhere near as dramatic as that, and the newly found giant planet isn’t hurting anywhere. In fact, despite its size, it orbits its star.
“We report the discovery of OGLE-2016-BLG-1190Lb, which is likely to be the first Spitzer microlensing planet in the galactic bulge/bar, an assignation that can be confirmed by two epochs of high-resolution imaging of the combined source-lens baseline object,” the scientists wrote in the study.
Phys.org notes that OGLE-2016-BLG-1190Lb is most likely a huge planet that has a mass of about 13.4 Jupiter masses.
Such high mass puts the object right at the deuterium burning limit—the conventional boundary between planets and brown dwarfs. Hence, astronomers have not excluded the possibility that the newly found alien world could be a low-mass brown dwarf.
The planet orbits its host star approximately every three (Earth) years at an average distance of about 2.0 AU.
The star system home of the planet that ‘should not exist’ is located some 22,000 light years away from the Earth.
The authors of the new study say how OGLE-2016-BLG-1190Lb is the first exoplanet discovered thanks to microlensing and the Spitzer spacecraft.
“Since the existence of the brown dwarf desert is the signature of different formation mechanisms for stars and planets, the extremely close proximity of OGLE-2016-BLG-1190Lb to this desert raises the question of whether it is truly a ‘planet’ (by formation mechanism) and therefore reacts back upon its role tracing the galactic distribution of planets,” the paper reads.
(H/T Phys.org)
Reference: The mirror
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