Rogue planet with mystical aurora discovered drifting beyond our solar system

A rogue planet over 12 times bigger than Jupiter was discovered using a radio telescope. This first of its kind object is around 20 light years away from Earth.

Dr Melodie Kao, an astronomer at Arizona State University said as per a report by Independent, “This object is right at the boundary between a planet and a brown dwarf, or ‘failed star’, and is giving us some surprises that can potentially help us understand magnetic processes on both stars and planets.”

The newly discovered planet was originally detected in 2016 and was considered to be a brown dwarf. Brown dwarfs, difficult to categorise, are too huge to be classified as planets and not big enough to be classified as stars.

The first of such astronomical bodies was observed in 1995 and the scientists are still trying to understand more about the radio emissions and magnetic fields of five brown dwarves.

Another team looking at the brown dwarf data, discovered an object called SIMP J01365663+0933473, to be far younger than the others. This meant that the object was a free-floating planet.

Dr Kao said, “ When it was announced that SIMP J01365663+0933473 had a mass near the deuterium-burning limit, I had just finished analysing its newest VLA data.”

The rogue planet along with some brown dwarves are known to have their own auroras, similar to the aurora borealis or the northern lights seen on Earth.

It is these radio signatures emitted by the auroras of such rogue objects that allow researchers to detect them. Still unclear about their formation, scientists claim that their study showing the auroral radio emissions can further be used to discover more such planets beyond our solar system.