When it comes to exoplanet discoveries, I’ve remarked several times in the past few months that we have reached the point where the only discoveries being announced with press releases are either massive data dumps from machine learning programs or the strange, weird, and unusual discoveries. This story is definitely the latter.

Undergraduate student Emma Sofich from Arizona State University recently led a team that studied data in the Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 citizen science project, and they found a brown dwarf binary system. Finding brown dwarfs is pretty amazing in and of itself, but this system has even more going for it – it’s the most widely separated pair in a binary system ever found. The two planets – failed stars? – are 129 astronomical units apart.

The system is called CWISE J014611.20 050850.0AB, and the results were presented at last week’s American Astronomical Society (AAS) press conferences with a paper to be published in The Astrophysical Journal.

More Information

ASU press release