OTS 44

Common card · No. 462293

OTS 44 is a young, free-floating planetary-mass brown dwarf, a "sub-brown dwarf", and rogue planet, located 520 to 630 light-years (160 to 192 parsecs) away in the star-forming molecular cloud Chamaeleon I in the constellation Chamaeleon. It is surrounded by a circumstellar disk of gas and dust, from which it is actively accreting mass at an approximate rate of 500 billion kilograms per second (or equivalently, 7.6×10−12 solar masses per year). With an estimated age between 1 and 6 million years, OTS 44 has not existed long enough to cool down, so it glows red with a temperature of around 1,700 K (1,430 °C; 2,600 °F) and a stellar spectral type of M9.5. It likely formed from the gravitational collapse of gas and dust, a similar process to how stars typically form. The disk of OTS 44 is estimated to span at least several astronomical units in radius with a flared shape—decreasing in density but increasing in vertical thickness at farther distances from the object. OTS 44's disk contains...

Read on Wikipedia · Image ESO VLT VIMOS & Melina Thévenot, CC BY-SA 4.0