Though they vary widely in other characteristics, we usually think of planets as having one unifying quality: they're all orbiting a star, right? Well ... apparently not. It seems there could be quite a few "orphan" worlds just floating out in space, and scientists think they just found one really close to Earth.

Using the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope and the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in Chile, a team of astronomers led by Philippe Delorme of the Institute of Planetology and Astrophysics of Grenoble in France discovered CFBDSIR2149, an object about 100 light-years from Earth that could be an orphaned planet that isn't tied to a star.

The object was found floating in a group of young stars known as the AB Doradus moving group, and scientists believe there's a 90 percent probability that CFBDSIR2149 is somehow tied to that group, and formed along with it 50 to 120 million years ago.

If Delorme and his colleagues are right about the object, then it's a gas giant planet with four to seven times the mass of Jupiter and a temperature that averages more than 800 degrees Farenheit. But there's also still a chance that CFBDSIR2149 is a brown dwarf, a gas object larger than most planets but too small to get the fusion reactions going that allow it to actually become a star.

Though it's definitely the closest to Earth that anyone's found so far, CFBDSIR2149 is very probably not the only "orphan" planet out there in the galaxy. In fact, previous studies have suggested there are actual more orphan planets than there are orbiting planets. But according to Delorme, even if that's true, CFBDSIR2149 is unusually large for what scientists usually think of when it comes to orphan planets.

(Via Huffington Post)

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Scientists may have found 'orphan' planet NOT orbiting a star