In 2012, astronomers discovered a rather strange isolated space object in the vicinity of our system. According to preliminary calculations, it turned out that its mass is greater than the mass of Jupiter. Based on the collected data, scientists initially took it for one of the so-called wandering planets. True, adjusted for the fact that we have never seen such wandering planets before. Recently, a new study was completed, which showed that the object, dubbed CFBDSIR 2149-0403, may not actually be a planet. At the same time, the find may be of much greater interest than initially thought.
Despite the fact that most of the planets discovered by science, as a rule, are in well-defined orbits of their native stars, recently it has become very common for astronomers to discover the so-called wandering planets, or wandering planets - planetary objects that were either thrown away from their stellar systems, or have never been part of any systems at all and therefore "freely roam" throughout our galaxy. When researchers first discovered CFBDSIR 2149-0403 in 2012, the discovery aroused interest, if only because the location of this "planet" turned out to be very close to our solar system - it is about 100 light years from us.
Of course, before making any conclusions, scientists usually first conduct an initiation rite to check the discovered candidates for the right to be called planets. It also happens that initially another brown dwarf is taken as a planet - an object of a sub-stellar class, heavier than the heaviest planets known to us in the visible Universe, but at the same time having a smaller mass, compared to even the lightest stars, which is not enough to support a thermonuclear synthesis.
On the basis of the data collected as part of the first study, scientists were able to deduce the assumption that the mass of CFBDSIR 2149-0403 is 4-7 times the mass of Jupiter, which would quite make it possible to write this object as a candidate for a wandering planet, since the mass The lightest brown dwarf ever discovered is more than 13 times the mass of Jupiter. In addition, scientists concluded that the wandering object may have once belonged to the star system AB Dorado, a relatively young group of stars orbiting our galaxy, having approximately the same age and, most likely, born in the same place. Based on all this, scientists have suggested that object CFBDSIR 2149-0403 may be relatively young, and its age is somewhere between 50 and 120 million years.
But everything turned out to be not as simple as we would like. The fact is that the deduced assumptions about the wandering planet CFBDSIR 2149-0402 were mainly made on the basis of just a few initial observations. For this reason, they were not accepted by everyone within the scientific community. The nature of this object was the most questionable. More precisely, its uncertainty. In the absence of any clear evidence, few could agree that this object could indeed be a planet and does not belong to any of the star systems.
To address this issue, a group of astronomers led by Fillippe Delorme from the University of Grenoble (France) - one of the astronomers who first discovered the object CFBDSIR 2149-0403 - has been observing the mysterious cosmic body over the past several years using a variety of telescopes. operating in a wide variety of spectrum ranges. Observations ultimately showed that the nature of CFBDSIR 2149-0402 is even more mysterious than originally thought.
First, as part of the new observations, the team of researchers received more accurate calculations of its location and direction of its movement, and also established that CFBDSIR 2149-0403 cannot be part of the AB Dorado migrating star system.
"New parallax and kinematic data for the object exclude the possibility of its belonging to any young traveling group, including AB Dorado," the team of scientists said in a paper published on the website arXiv.org.
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When it comes to classifying this object, this conclusion is both good and bad news. The fact is that in addition to providing new information about this object, it also seriously expands its age limit, proposed in the framework of the very first study.
“The new data, of course, expanded our knowledge of this object, but at the same time raised its age to the status of a free parameter,” Delorme told Phys.org.
The researchers also found that the object either has low gravity or has a high metal content, showing a high level of metallicity. The new study has also lowered the degree of certainty about the object's mass. Scientists are now unable to say for sure whether CFBDSIR 2149-0403 is a planet, or whether it can be written into the class of brown dwarfs.
Based on all the information collected so far about this object, two hypotheses can be derived: CFBDSIR 2149-0403 is either a young (less than 500 million years old) rogue planet with a mass from 2 to 13 times the mass of Jupiter, or it is an old 2 to 3 billion years) is a brown dwarf with a very large iron supply and a mass between 2 and 40 times that of Jupiter. However, according to Delorme, this object in general may be something else that we have never met before.
“CFBDSIR 2149-0403 is an unusual sub-stellar object that is either a 'free-floating planet' or some extremely rare type of brown dwarf with a high concentration of metal in its composition. Perhaps it is generally a combination of these two types of objects,”says Delorme.
The results of the study by scientists from the University of Grenoble were published for scientific peer review on the arXiv.org portal, so until other astronomers read them, it will be early to draw any conclusions regarding CFBDSIR 2149-0403. But there is also good news: CFBDSIR 2149-0403 is in relative proximity to us, and, therefore, there is an opportunity for further observation, which, possibly, will allow in the end to establish its true nature. It is possible that science could have encountered a completely new class of planetary objects that no one had ever observed before.
NIKOLAY KHIZHNYAK