During its search for brown dwarfs, the PS1 telescope stumbled across a special planet, one that is not orbiting around a star. To be precise, it’s not moving at all, completely stationary. This planet, named PSO J318.5-22 after its discovering telescope is also one of the lightest, if not the lightest, free-floating object we have ever discovered. And it is the first free-floating planet we’ve discovered. Chemically, this planet contains elements one would normally find in a gas-giant orbiting a young star. Although PSO J318.5-22 is only 12 million years old, basically fresh out of the womb in terms of planetary ages, it is certainly don’t orbiting around anything at all. It is 80 light-years away from Earth. When you mass it with Jupiter, it would weigh roughly 6 times more than it.
A particularly special thing about this lonely planet is its color. When we first named colors of stars: white dwarfs and brown dwarfs, it’s because at a distance, white dwarfs look white, and in fact, they are extremely white, and brown dwarfs look brown to us but they are in fact very red in color. The extraordinary thing about PSO J318.5-22 is that even through a telescope, it looked redder than a brown dwarf did. And since it is not orbiting or close to a star, it is much easier for us to observe it. This is certainly a breakthrough in science because we have not previously discovered a lone planet. There will certainly be more similar and more astound discoveries in the future, especially since we have only recently in the past decade began to rapidly discover exoplanets. As Dr. Eugene Magnier of the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawaii at Manoa describe this discovery, “searching for a needle in a haystack”. Apparently, this particular discovery of the PSO J318.5-22 was like finding a needle in ” the biggest haystack that exists in astronomy”. As small as the probability is, time will be the cornerstone of astronomical discovery in years to come.
http://www.astrobio.net/pressrelease/5739/a-strange-lonely-planet-that-has-no-star
