ASTRONOMERS find ROGUE PLANET with NO SUN. Intergalactic Jack Bauer ++

Sweet Nipple Squirts, the planet has gone rogue! Apparently watched too many episodes of 24. Decided to take affairs into its own hands. Astronomical Wizards have identified a Rogue Planet with no sun. You know, just floating through the fucking cosmos and shit.

A planet six times more massive than Jupiter has been spotted drifting, cold and alone, eighty light years from Earth. It’s a sunless world, and astronomers say it could be the first real example of a free-floating planet to date. But how it got separated from its parent star in the first place remains a mystery.

“We have never before seen an object free-floating in space that looks like this,” said lead researcher Michael Liu, of the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawaii at Manao, in a statement.

With no sun to call its own, the planet, which goes by PSO J318.5-22, joins the ranks of a cadre of similarly solitary entitiesto be discovered in recent years. But while previous free-floating, planet-like bodies (dubbed “planetary-mass objects,” or “planemos” by those who would deny them full-on planetary status) have been notoriously difficult to distinguish from failed stars known as brown dwarfs, the astronomers who discovered PSO J318.5-22 say its identify is unambiguous.

It’s true Liu’s team first noticed PSO J318.5-22 while searching for traces of failed stars in data amassed by Pan-STARRS1, a wide-field survey telescope situated atop Haleakala volcano, on the Hawaiian island of Maui. Like a brown dwarf, the object, which emits most of its energy at infrared wavelengths, showed up in readings as faint and red. What set PSO J318.5-22 apart was that it was very red – far redder, in fact, than even the reddest brown dwarfs on record.

[io9]