Save over 40% when you secure your tickets today to TNW Conference 💥 Prices will increase on November 22 →

All Articles for

Rogue Planet

A rogue planet, also known as an interstellar planet, nomad planet, free-floating planet or orphan planet, is a planetary-mass object that orbits the galaxy directly. They have either been ejected from the planetary system in which they formed or never been gravitationally bound to any star or brown dwarf. Some planetary-mass objects are thought to have formed in a similar way to stars, and the IAU has proposed that those objects be called sub-brown dwarfs (an example of this is Cha 110913-773444, which may be an ejected rogue planet or may have formed on its own and be a sub-brown dwarf). The closest free-floating planetary mass object to Earth yet discovered, WISE 0855−0714, is around 7 light years away. Recent observations of a very young free-floating planetary mass object with the Herschel Space Observatory and the Very Large Telescope demonstrate that the processes that characterize the canonical star-like mode of formation apply to isolated objects down to a few Jupiter masses. Herschel far-infrared observations show that the young free-floating planetary mass object OTS 44 is surrounded by a disk with a mass of at least 10 Earth masses and can, therefore, eventually form a mini-planetary system. Spectroscopic observations of OTS 44 with the SINFONI spectrograph at the Very Large Telescope reveal that the disk is actively accreting matter similar as young stars. " In December 2013 a candidate exomoon of a free-floating planet was announced.