A workforce {of professional} astronomers and citizen scientists from the Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 mission has found a planetary-mass object co-moving with a star known as BD+60 1417.
WISE photos of the BD+60 1417 system. Image credit score: Léopold Gramaize / Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 mission.
BD+60 1417, also referred to as SAO 15880 and TIC 159527171, is a younger K0-type star positioned about 146 light-years away within the constellation of Ursa Major.
“This star had been looked at by more than one campaign searching for exoplanet companions. But previous teams looked really tight, really close to the star,” mentioned Dr. Jackie Faherty, an astronomer on the American Museum of Natural History and co-founder of the Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 mission.
“Because citizen scientists really liked the project, they found an object that many of these direct imaging surveys would have loved to have found, but they didn’t look far enough away from its host.”
In 2018, Backyard Worlds participant Jörg Schümann from Germany alerted the mission scientists to a brand new co-moving system: an object that gave the impression to be transferring with a star.
After confirming the system’s movement, the researchers used ground-based telescopes to watch BD+60 1417 and its companion individually and had been instantly excited by what they noticed.
Named CWISER J124332.12+600126.2 (W1243 for brief), the brand new object has a mass of about 15 occasions the mass of Jupiter.
This vary overlaps with an necessary cutoff level — 13 occasions the mass of Jupiter — which is usually used to tell apart planets from brown dwarfs.
“We don’t have a very good definition of the word ‘planet’,” Dr. Faherty mentioned.
Another defining function is how they type: planets type from materials gathering in disks round stars, whereas brown dwarfs are born from the collapse of large clouds of fuel, much like how stars type.
But the bodily properties of W1243 don’t present any clues to its formation.
“There are hints that maybe it’s more like an exoplanet, but there’s nothing conclusive yet. However, it is an outlier,” Dr. Faherty mentioned.
W1243 may be very distant from the host star — about 1,662 occasions farther than the Earth is from the Sun.
“You had an exoplanet community just staring so close to it,” Dr. Faherty mentioned.
“And we just pulled out a little, and we found an object. That makes me excited about what we might be missing in giant planets that might exist around these stars. Sometimes, you need to broaden your scope.”
A paper describing the invention was printed within the Astrophysical Journal.
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Jacqueline Ok. Faherty et al. 2021. A Wide Planetary Mass Companion Discovered by means of the Citizen Science Project Backyard Worlds: Planet 9. ApJ 923, 48; doi: 10.3847/1538-4357/ac2499