Astronomers discover a giant world – but is it a planet?
by Stuart Clark from on (#37K6J)
A recently-discovered giant world lies right on the boundary between being a star and a planet - and that could answer some big questions
'When is a planet not a planet?' is a lot more than the beginning of a poor joke at a drunken astronomers' Christmas party (but we laughed nonetheless). It is actually a serious question that cuts to the heart of our ignorance about how celestial objects form.
The discovery of a giant planet 22,000 light years away may now help shine some light on this particularly knotty problem. The planet is called OGLE-2016-BLG-1190. It was found on June 2016 by the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment (Ogle), a Polish astronomical project run by the University of Warsaw.
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