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posted by martyb on Monday August 06 2018, @02:28PM   Printer-friendly
from the photogenic-chicken dept.

A bizarre rogue planet without a star is roaming the Milky Way just 20 light-years from Earth. And according to a recently published study in The Astrophysical Journal, this strange, nomadic world has an incredibly powerful magnetic field that is some 4 million times stronger than Earth's, which generates spectacular auroras that would put our northern lights to shame.

The new observations, made with the National Science Foundation's Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA), provide not only the first radio detection of a planetary mass object beyond our solar system, but also mark the first time researchers have measured the magnetic field of such a body.

[...] The peculiar and untethered object, succinctly named SIMP J01365663+0933473 (we'll call it SIMP for simplicity's sake), was first discovered back in 2016. At the time, researchers thought SIMP was a brown dwarf: an object that's too big to be a planet, but too small to be a star. However, last year, another study showed that SIMP is just small enough, at 12.7 times the mass and 1.2 times the radius of Jupiter, to be considered a planet — albeit a mammoth one.

"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," said Arizona State University's Melodie Kao, who led the new study on SIMP, in a press release.

[...] SIMP seems to be a massive and magnetic exoplanet without a star that may have a moon that is generating brilliant auroras while wandering the Milky Way.

[...] "Detecting SIMP J01365663+0933473 with the VLA through its auroral radio emission also means that we may have a new way of detecting exoplanets, including the elusive rogue ones not orbiting a parent star," said co-author Gregg Hallinan of Caltech.

http://www.astronomy.com/news/2018/08/free-range-planet

-- submitted from IRC


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 06 2018, @04:34PM (4 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 06 2018, @04:34PM (#717889)

    Does electric universe theory propose this will be true of all rogue planets or just this one?

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 06 2018, @04:51PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 06 2018, @04:51PM (#717894)

    For instance, one major idea in the Electric Universe is that comets are not snowy ice balls, but rather just asteroids that have very eccentric orbits, thereby placing them for a lengthy period in a different electrical potential from the inner universe; as this body enters the inner solar system, it experiences electrical effects (which machine the surface with ridges, depressions, wind-like dunes, etc.) all of which result in the telltale coma, as well.

    The recent encounters with and observations of comets tend to lend credence to this idea; certainly, they do not support the old ideas of comets.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 06 2018, @10:40PM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 06 2018, @10:40PM (#718019)

      as this body enters the inner solar system, it experiences electrical effects (which machine the surface with ridges, depressions, wind-like dunes, etc.) all of which result in the telltale coma, as well.

      If you have an electric field strong enough to rip away pieces of rock, that same field will change the orbit of the comet so much that everyone will notice. But it is not happening. Furthermore, many robots traveled the space, measured the EM field and found nothing extraordinary.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 07 2018, @04:41PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 07 2018, @04:41PM (#718312)

        We're talking about phenomena that occur repeatedly over eons.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 06 2018, @05:30PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 06 2018, @05:30PM (#717918)

    No, to be affected the rogue planet needs to have a decently strong magnetic field. There could be a coupling effect where the charged particles deliver energy to the planet via the magnetic field, but there are a lot of interconnected systems and ways the energy could be shed faster than it is gathered. As another user pointed out this has literally nothing to do with the Electric universe theory