Brown dwarf discovery perplexes planetary physicists

New York Times : Oph1622, a small brown dwarf with a giant planet photographed by the European Southern Observatory , is raising more questions amongst astronomers and planetary physicists over what defines a planet. Oph1622 has a mass equal to 14 Jupiters, or about one-seventy-fifth that of the Sun. A brown dwarf is a failed star, one that has not reached sufficient mass to start nuclear self-ignition. The planet that orbits Oph1622, one of only three planets outside the solar system known to have been photographed by astronomers, is half as large as the star itself, with a mass of 7 Jupiters. Both Oph1622 and the planet are only 1 million years old, and cannot be explained by the standard descriptions of planetary/solar system formations. The photograph and accompanying paper were published on Science magazine’s web site last night."It really stands out as something quite unusual and intriguing,” said Ray Jayawardhana, a professor of astronomy at the University of Toronto and an author of the Science paper. “The Oph1622 pair adds to the rich diversity of worlds that have been discovered recently, a diversity that we couldn’t really have imagined barely a decade ago.” Read Science paper: Discovery of a Young Planetary Mass Binary ESO Press release