By: Eugene Magnier

Eugene Magnier — Tue, 15 Oct 2013 20:46:53 +0000

The proper motion is just about 0.2 arcseconds per year, which comes to about 22 km per second at its distance. While this is fast compared to human speeds (2 times the escape velocity from the Earth), it is fairly slow by the standards of most stars. It is is much slower than the "runaway" stars generally thought to be companions to stars that have since gone supernova. Those have speeds greater than 100 km/sec (and are usually quite massive stars). Young stars and brown dwarfs like PSO J318.5-22 start off with fairly low speeds, but after hundreds of millions of years moving around the molecular clouds and clusters of stars in our Galaxy, they go faster and faster. PSO J318.5-22 actually has about the same speed and direction of motion as stars in nearby loose cluster called the "Beta Pictoris Moving Group", and we believe it was formed with that group of stars. This is one of the reasons we believe we know the age of this object fairly well. For more details on PSO J318.5-22 and some of these other topics, here are some links: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1310.0457v1.pdf (our paper) http://www.eso.org/public/news/eso9702 (supernova runaway stars)

By: Mr. Raymond Kenneth Petry

Mr. Raymond Kenneth Petry — Fri, 11 Oct 2013 01:14:31 +0000

What is its proper motion–? Can it be determined whether it has the velocity of a typical star in the interstellar region, Or faster enough to consider it might be a freed planet from an ‘ancient’ supernova…?

Comments on: Strange lonely planet found without a star

By: Eugene Magnier

By: Mr. Raymond Kenneth Petry