Report

Possible planetary-mass exosatellite detected around brown dwarf CD-35 2722 B

Nature reports radial-velocity evidence suggesting a Jupiter-mass object orbits brown dwarf CD-35 2722 B; whether it’s an exomoon remains unclear.

1 Source, ,

Artist’s impression of CD-35 2722, a system with a moon-like object
This illustration shows the system around the star CD-35 2722, with the newly found moon-like object at the centre. The star –– the point source to the left –– has about half the mass of our Sun, and it is orbited by a brown dwarf, the reddish-brown object seen here in the foreground (right). The brown dwarf has about 37 times the mass of Jupiter: too massive to be a planet, but not massive enough to have sustained nuclear fusion like stars. This brown dwarf is, in turn, orbited by a newly discovered object at least as massive as Jupiter, seen at the centre of this image.
This new object, found with ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), is difficult to label. It behaves like a moon in the sense that it orbits an object that orbits a star. But this ‘moon’ is massive enough to be a planet, and the object it orbits, a brown dwarf, is neither a planet nor a star.
Credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser

TLDR

Nature reports radial-velocity evidence for a Jupiter-mass object orbiting brown dwarf CD-35 2722 B. A Nature Japan highlight says the dwarf orbits a star, potentially making this the first known three-level hierarchical system of its kind. Whether the object is an exoplanet or an exomoon remains unclear because there is no definitive classification scheme.

Today's Rank

—

Not ranked yet

Combined views

2.2K

1 Source, first seen 20d ago