Free floating planets -- planets without any star -- are exotic things, presumably thrown out of their original solar system by gravitational interactions with other worlds. But the line between such wanderers and bound planets isn’t always clear. A case in point is the object 2MASS J2126, found in an infrared sky survey and at one point considered to be part of a group of young stars known as the Tucana Horologium Association. If linked to this group, its age could be inferred and it was young and low enough in mass to be considered an independent planet. Now we learn otherwise, as a research team from the United Kingdom, Australia and the United States has determined that 2MASS J2126 is in an extraordinarily wide orbit around the star TYC 9486-927-1. Lead author Niall Deacon (University of Hertfordshire) has been focusing for several years on young stars with planetary companions in wide orbits. But this system has to come as a surprise. The young planet is about 1 trillion...

My essay Intensifying the Proxima Centauri Planet Hunt is now available on the European Southern Observatory's Pale Red Dot site. My intent was to give background on earlier searches for planets around the nearest star, leading up to today's efforts, which include the Pale Red Dot work using HARPS, the High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher spectrograph at La Silla, as well as David Kipping's ongoing transit searches with data from the Canadian MOST satellite (Microvariability & Oscillations of STars), and gravitational microlensing studies by Kailash Sahu (Space Telescope Science Institute). As it turned out, the choice of earlier Proxima planet hunts as a topic fit in where Alan Boss had left off. Boss (Carnegie Institution for Science) had led off the Pale Red Dot campaign's outreach effort with a piece on the overall background of exoplanetology (Pale Blue Dot, Pale Red Dot, Pale Green Dot). Whatever the color of the distant world, our tools are developing rapidly, and...

Knowing that the data from New Horizons continues to arrive gives me a warm feeling about the months ahead. Below we have the highest resolution color image of one of the two potential cryovolcanoes found on the surface during the Pluto flyby last summer. This is Wright Mons, some 150 kilometers across and 4 kilometers high. If this is indeed a volcano, none has been discovered in the outer system that can compare with it in size. Image credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute. The image is a composite drawn from New Horizons' Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) on July 14, 2015. The range is approximately 48,000 kilometers, giving us features down to 450 meters across. JHU/APL has also incorporated color data from the Ralph/Multispectral Visible Imaging Camera (MVIC) taken about 20 minutes after the LORRI images were taken, from a range of 34,000 kilometers, and with a resolution of 650 meters per pixel. The scene on the...

A new observational campaign for Proxima Centauri, coordinated by Guillem Anglada-Escudé (Queen Mary University, London), is about to begin, an effort operating under the name Pale Red Dot. You'll recall Dr. Anglada-Escudé's name from his essay Doppler Worlds and M-Dwarf Planets, which ran here in the spring of last year, as well as from Centauri Dreams reports on his work on Gliese 667C, among other exoplanet projects. Pale Red Dot is a unique undertaking that brings the public into an ongoing campaign from the outset, one whose observations at the European Southern Observatory's La Silla Observatory begin today. The closest star to our Sun, Proxima Centauri was discovered just over 100 years ago by the Scottish astronomer Robert Innes. A search through the archives here will reveal numerous articles about the red dwarf and the previous attempts to find planets orbiting it. I'll point you to a round-up of exoplanet work on Proxima thus far next week, when my essay...

If they did nothing else for us, space missions might be worth the cost purely for their role in tuning up human ingenuity. Think of rescues like Galileo, where the Jupiter-bound mission lost the use of its high-gain antenna and experienced numerous data recorder issues, yet still managed to return priceless data. Mariner 10 overcame gyroscope problems by using its solar panels for attitude control, as controllers tapped into the momentum imparted by sunlight. Overcoming obstacles is part of the game, and teasing out additional science through extended missions taps into the same creativity. Now we have news of how successful yet another mission re-purposing has been through results obtained from K2, the Kepler 'Second Light' mission that grew out of problems with the critical reaction wheels aboard the spacecraft. It was in November of 2013 that K2 was proposed, with NASA approval in May of the following year. Kepler needed its reaction wheels to hold it steady, but like Mariner 10,...

Given this site’s predilections, it’s natural to think of Centauri A and B whenever the topic of planets around close binary stars comes up. But systems with somewhat similar configurations can produce equally interesting results. Take what we’re finding around the G-class star HD 7449, some 127 light years from our Sun. In 2011, a planet of roughly eight times Jupiter’s mass was found orbiting the star in an orbit so eccentric that it demanded explanation. A highly eccentric orbit can indicate another object in the system that is affecting the planet. Exactly what has now been determined. “The question was: is it a planet or a dwarf star?” says Timothy Rodigas (Carnegie Institution for Science), who led the work on the discovery. Rodigas’ team went to work using the Magellan adaptive optics system (MagAO) on the Magellan II (Clay) instrument at Las Campanas in Chile. MagAO allows sharp visible-light images to be acquired, with the instrument capable of resolving objects down to the...