It sounds like an interstellar sob story: a lonely planet expelled from it’s Solar System at a young age and forced to wander the galaxy alone. But what makes us so sure such objects are even planets, and does their discovery change how we view the universe?
More than 2 years ago, the PanSTARRS telescope on Hawaii captured a dim red blob on its sensitive cameras. However, the importance of this dot was overlooked and the image was added to a 4000TB database of images, where the evidence of this discovery sat in wait. More than 18 months later it was rediscovered by Michael Liu and colleagues at the University of Hawaii who decided to take a closer look.
They found the point of light, now named PSO J318.5-22, to be an extremely red object only 80 light years away and floating freely through space. By studying the colours of the object they were able to determine a surface temperature of only 1160K and a mass only 6.5 times more than Jupiter . To begin nuclear fusion in the centre of a star, it needs to be larger than 13 Jupiter masses, making this object far too cold and small to be a normal star.
It is not the first ‘Rogue planet’ to have been discovered, with a further 4 objects found by similar sky surveys. These all have sizes in the region between large Gas Giant Planets (5Mjup) and small Dwarf stars (15Mjup). In all cases, including with PSO J318.5-22, these size estimates are extremely unreliable with a margin for error of up to 5Mjup either way.
Logic might suggest that, if a ball of gas is too small to be a star, it must be a planet. However the boundary between the smallest stars and the largest planets is a very blurred one. The astronomers involved were careful not to call their discovery a planet, instead giving it the label of “late-L dwarf”, similar to a Brown Dwarf (right). That being said, similar sized objects such as the gas giants around HR8799 have made it into the nearly 1000-strong catalogue of exoplanets. So what makes this a special case?
One reason is the loneliness of PSO J318.5-22. In 2006 the International Astronomical Union met for a now-infamous meeting to demote Pluto to the diminutive status of dwarf planet. This decision also came with a new set of definitions for what it takes for an object to be considered a planet. Not surprisingly, clause number one was: it must orbit a star.
While the recent discovery falls down on this particular point, many commentators have pointed out that PSO J318.5-22 may well have been formed around a star before being expelled. This is not as far-fetched as it might sound; many models of planet-star interactions in complicated two-star systems have shown that planets could be tossed around like billiard balls.
However, there is another option: PSO J318.5-22 could have formed in a collapsing cloud of gas and dust just like every other star in the universe. Such a scenario would completely exclude it from the definition of planet, making it more ‘Failed Star’ than ‘super-Jupiter’. Without further investigations it is impossible to know the answer.
In many ways the question of formation is unimportant: without a star to orbit, these are not planets. It may be a case of soul-searching but, while the slow cooling of PSO J318.5-22 from warm proto-star to a lifeless ball of gas might interest a handful of stellar physicists, it is conventional planets like our own that can really challenge the understanding of our place in the universe.
Read the paper here on ArXiv