whoa no way?

This planet is 8X the mass of Jupiter…seriously.  That is pretty ginormous and the finding surprised a lot of astronomers.  There has been so much information regarding exoplanets and potential discoveries at the edge of our solar system.  It is had to keep up and you can add this to the list of cool new discoveries.  Here is a bit more about what they found:

A massive rogue planet has been discovered in the Beta Pictoris moving group. The planet, called PSO J318.5338-22.8603 (Sorry, I didn’t name it), is over eight times as massive as Jupiter. Because it’s one of the few directly-imaged exoplanets we know of, and is accessible for study by spectroscopy, this massive planet will be extremely important when piecing together the details of planetary formation and evolution.

You will noticed they used spectroscopy in their searching and spotting technique.  This is used by a majority of astronomers when a planet is observeble visually with a telescope vs. estimating it’s position exclusively from mathematical modeling.

Let’s find out more about this bizarre planet on the next page

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