A strange planet has been spotted by scientist. The planet is traveling alone i.e without a star of other planets. It was discovered that the planet is about 200 million years old and 20 light years away from us. The rogue as is called by researchers is producing and unexplained glowing aurora.
This newly discovered planet has been giving the name SIMP J01365663+0933473. It has a mass that is 12.7 times the mass of Jupiter which is the biggest planet in our solar system and a strong magnetic field which is about 200 times stronger than the magnetic field of jupiter. It has a surface temperature of 1500°F(815.56°C).
This is the first radio-telescope detection and measurement of the magnetic field of an object like this outside our solar system.
It was found by Astronomers using the National Science Foundation's Karl G. Jansky Very large Array radio astronomy observatory located in New Mexico.
There is still speculation that it could be a brown dwarf instead of a planet. This comes from the debate among Astronomers about the difference between a gas giant and a brown dwarf. There have however agreed on a dividing line that when an object is about 13 size the mass of Jupiter coupled with some other characteristics, it can be classified as a brown dwarf. This object is just at the boundary between planet and a brown dwarf.
Brown dwarfs are too massive to be considered as planets even though they are not massive enough to sustain the hydrogen nuclear fusion processes at their cores which power stars. 1995 is the year that the first brown dwarf was discovered.
The newest data from the radio astronomy observatory helped researchers determine the strong magnetic field producing the auroras which gave off the radio signal that was detected. The auroras produced on Earth which occurs when our magnetic field interacts with solar wind is similar to the aurora produced on this newly discovered planet.
Brown dwarfs do not have solar winds is the reason why their production of strong auroras is still unclear.
