Rogue Planet

Hubble Image of so-called 'Rogue' Planet is actually a Star
CNN.com, April 7, 2000

A distant object discovered two years ago and thought to be a planet is not a planet at all. It is actually a star, according to astronomers. The Hubble Space Telescope image was originally thought to show the only planet ever directly observed outside our solar system. Astronomers now say the object is too hot to be a planet, and therefore must be a star. "Astronomers now believe it is more likely that the strange object is a background star whose light has been dimmed and reddened by interstellar dust, giving the illusion that it is in the vicinity of the double star system in which it was initially believed to have been a planet," NASA said in a statement Thursday. NASA released the image of the object called, "TMR-1C," to much fanfare in 1998, hailing it as the first extra-solar planet ever photographed. It showed a glowing dot at the end of a massive stream of gas, stretching back to a binary star in the consellation Taurus. A binary star is a pair of stars that closely orbit each other. Though Taurus is 450 light years away, the object was large enough to be photographed by the Hubble, meaning it would have to be many times larger than the size of Jupiter (really the size of a small star). A light year is a measure of distance, about 6 trillion miles.

Astronomer Susan Terebey of the Extrasolar Research Corp. in Pasadena, CA, who analysed TMR-1C, announced at a NASA press conference in 1998 that she thought the object was a hot proto-planet that for some reason had been expelled from its star system and was shooting out into intersellar space all by itself. She did say at the time that scientists needed to make further observations to confirm her theory. Now, in a paper on her re-evaluation of the object being published in the May Astronomical Journal, Tereby states, "The new data do not lend weight to the protoplanetinterpretation, and the results remain consistent with the explanation that TMR-1C may be a background star."

NASA endorsed the new findings. Astronomers have detected over thirty extra solar planets, using what they call the "wobble" method. In this technique, the researchers do not look for the planets themselves, but rather stars that are wobbling due to the gravitational pull of an orbiting planet. The reassessment of TMR 1-C has no bearing on the planetary status of the last extra solar planets found using the wobble method. Astronomer Susan Terebey of the Extrasolar Research Corp., Pasadena, California, who analysed TMR-1C, announced at a NASA press conference in 1998 that she thought the object was a hot proto-planet that for some reason had been expelled from its star system and was shooting out into intersellar space all by itself. But she said that scientists needed to make further observations to confirm her theory. Now, in a paper to be published in the May Astronomical Journal, Tereby states, "The new data do not lend weight to the protoplanet interpretation and the results remain consistent with the explanation that TMR-1C may be a background star."