Far Out! Most Distant Exoplanet From its Star

[Yazata]

Astronomers have discovered the planet with the largest known orbit.

The planet is known as J2126 and is about 13x the mass of Jupiter and was originally thought to be a 'rogue planet', a planet in interstellar space that doesn't orbit a star. It's now believed to orbit a small and young M-class red-dwarf star with the catchy name TYC 9486-927-1. The new planet's distance from its star is approximately 6,900 astronomical units (the Earth-Sun distance). For comparison Neptune is about 30 AU from the Sun, Pluto averages 40 AU. With an orbit like that, J2126's year is approximately 900,000 years.

http://www.sci-news.com/astronomy/planet...03590.html

[C C]

Astronomers have discovered the planet with the largest known orbit. The planet is known as J2126 and is about 13x the mass of Jupiter and was originally thought to be a 'rogue planet', a planet in interstellar space that doesn't orbit a star.

13 Jupiter masses is supposedly the boundary where something less can get designated a planet and something more can get classed a brown dwarf. Insufficient size / mass of J2126 will apparently keep the situation from looking like a "failed" binary star system, along with the fact that J2126 is orbiting the dwarf star rather than both orbiting one another around a common center of mass.

[...] The new planet's distance from its star is approximately 6,900 astronomical units (the Earth-Sun distance). For comparison Neptune is about 30 AU from the Sun, Pluto averages 40 AU.

As another contrast, Alpha Centauri A & B vary between 11.2 and 35.6 AU from each other. But binary stars can be separated by as much as a light year. Scrawny Proxima Centauri is 15,000 AU from that binary star system which it might be gravitationally associated with. Despite also being labeled "Alpha Centauri C", it's surprisingly not a done deal that Proxima actually is orbiting the binary pair. It would have an orbital period between 100,000 and 500,000 years if it was.