You might be tempt to reckon that by now we must have nailed down exactly what it demand to make a planet , but there you ’d be mistaken . In ecumenical , it is an target that orbits a principal , monolithic enough to have its own gravitational attraction to make it spherical – but not so massive that it is able to fuse H into He – while also clear away any detritus as it move on its festal orbit .

This is fine for smaller rocky planets , but as the gaseous miscellanea start to get a scrap larger , things begin to get a slight blurry . At some dot , the celestial object sprain from a planet into a " failed " mavin , otherwise known as a brown gnome . Now anew studyrecently published may well have identify a massive aim in the Milky Way ’s bump that is at this unknown threshold , and is either a giant exoplanet or a sub - stellar entity . They ’re just not certain which .

The possible sinewy planet is site some 22,000 clear - years off , andwas discover in June last yearas a microlensing upshot by the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment ( OGLE ) ground in Poland , in which the gravity of the massive object alters the light from its parent star render away its existence and mass . It has been named OGLE-2016 - BLG-1190Lb .

The researchers have bring off to calculate that is it rough 13.4 times the mass of Jupiter , which itself is 318 times the mint of Earth , making this latest possible planet a stonking 4,261 times the mass of our little sorry pane . Now the generally accepted definition of a brown nanus is a substellar object that weighs between 13 and 75 Jupiter Mass .

Going by this , the colossal body would just sneak into the category of brown dwarfs , although fascinatingly , properly at the very lowest peck possible . But if this is correct , then there ’s another trouble .

You see the objective is located smack eruption in the middle of a geographical zone surrounding the star it is orbiting known as the “ brown dwarf desert ” . As the name suggest , this region is not unremarkably colligate with brown dwarfs due , it was thought , to how theyform from collapsing gun . If this occurs too close to the star , then the warmth from the stellar object blows the accelerator pedal aside and the brown dwarf can not work . And yet here is   OGLE-2016 - BLG-1190Lb .

So if this epic object is indeed a failed star , then it would fire quite a few questions , to say the least .