If you thought sitting alone at the lunch table was bad, imagine drifting alone through space. This is the life of PSO J318.5-22, the Jupiter-esque exoplanet floating a mere 80 light-years away from earth. Clocking in at just 12 million years old, astronomers hope that the (relatively) young gas giant will give some insight as to how similar planets behave shortly after their birth. The absense of a bright star allows researchers to study it much more easily.
A 2-year observation, which concluded in october, placed the small exoplanet within a collection of young stars called the Beta Pictoris, a moving group that formed about 12 million years ago. The star in question has a planet very similar to PSO J318.5-22 orbiting it, but unlike Beta’s planet, this one doesn’t orbit any star, leading astronomers to question how it was formed and how it wound up floating without a star
