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Scientists said they first discovered a bizarre new “super planet” using an old form of technology: radio transmission.
What is happening?
In a new study, the researchers said they found the planet BDR J1750 + 3809 – or, simply, Elegast – using NASA instruments and the Low-Frequency Array (LOFAR) telescope in Europe.
Elegast is a brown dwarf, a planetary object too cold and small to become a star.
Technology paves the way for scientists to discover more planets in the near future.
- “This work opens up a whole new method for finding colder objects floating in the vicinity of the sun, which would otherwise be too faint to be detected by the methods used over the past 25 years,” said study co-author Michael Liu in a statement.
How the researchers found it
Brown stars are often considered “failed stars” due to the fact that they are somewhere between a large planet and a small star, according to the study. They lack the mass to create the fusion of hydrogen in their core. Then they glow in the infrared wavelengths from the heat created upon their formation.
Brown dwarfs also emit radio wavelengths. Jupiter is another planet that does this even though it’s not a brown dwarf, according to the study.
- “We asked ourselves, ‘Why point our radio telescope at cataloged brown dwarfs?'” Said Harish Vedantham, lead author of the study and astronomer at ASTRON in the Netherlands. “Let’s just take a big picture of the sky and discover these objects directly on the radio.”
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