Largest Solar System Ever Discovered Dwarfs Our Own

Photo Credit: University of Hertfordshire/Neil CookA huge alien world orbits 600 billion miles (1 trillion kilometers) from its host star, making its solar system the largest one known, a new study reports.

Astronomers have found the parent star for a gas-giant exoplanet named 2MASS J2126, which was previously thought to be a “rogue” world flying freely through space. The planet and its star are separated by about 7,000 astronomical units (AU), meaning the alien world completes one orbit every 900,000 years or so, researchers said. (One AU is the average distance from Earth to the sun — about 93 million miles, or 150 million km).

For comparison, Neptune lies about 30 AU from the sun, Pluto averages about 40 AU from Earth’s star and scientists think the newly hypothesized “Planet Nine” never gets more than 600 to 1,200 AU away from the sun.

“The planet is not quite as lonely as we first thought, but it’s certainly in a very long-distance relationship,” study lead author Niall Deacon, of the University of Hertfordshire in England, said in a statement . . .

Deacon and his colleagues analyzed databases of rogue planets, young stars and brown dwarfs— strange objects bigger than planets, but too small to ignite the internal fusion reactions that power stars — to see if they could link any of them together. (Read more from “Largest Solar System Ever Discovered Dwarfs Our Own” HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.