Lonely planet clinging onto its star: Incredible image of alien world 1,200 light years away reveals an unusually large orbit

It might look more like a fleck of dust on your computer or phone screen, but the tiny dot circled in red in the photograph is in fact a distant planet, the Daily Mail reports. 

This one has caught the attention of astronomers because of its incredibly huge orbit.

The planet, named CVSO 30c, orbits its star at 600 times the distance between the Earth and the sun. and it takes 27,000 years for it to complete a roundtrip.

This is strange because orbiting the same star is much planet in which an entire year is completed in just 11 hours. 

The newly-discovered planet is orbiting a T-Tauri star named CVSO 30, which is 1,200 light-years away from Earth in the 25 Orionis group.

It was found by a group of astronomers led by Dr Tobias Schmidt, from the University of Hamburg.

The study combined observations from the ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile, the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii, and the Calar Alto Observatory facilities in Spain.

In 2012, astronomers found CVSO 30 was host to one exoplanet (CVSO 30b). This was found using a detection method known as the transit method, where the light from a star observably dips as a planet travels in front of it.

Another method used for finding exoplanets is called direct imaging which, as the name suggests, involves looking directly at the planet.

But this method is extremely difficult. Because they are small and dim, planets are easily lost in the brilliant glare of the giant stars they orbit.

Direct imaging is only effective for planets on wide orbits around young stars, because the light from the planet is not overwhelmed by light from the host star, which makes it easier to spot.  The new planet, CVSO 30c, was able to be seen through direct imaging because it orbits so unusually far from its host star - at 600 times the distance between the Earth and the sun.

Because of this, it takes an incredible 27,000 years to complete a single orbit.

'Direct imaging has developed into a very successful technique for the detection of exoplanets in wide orbits, especially around young stars,' the authors wrote in the paper, published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.

'Directly imaged planets can both be followed astrometrically on their orbits and observed spectroscopically, and thus provide an essential tool for our understanding of the early solar system.'

This is the first time two planets have been found using two different methods, orbiting the same host star.

'CVSO 30 b and c allow for the first time a comprehensive study of both a transiting and a directly imaged planet candidate within the same system, hence at the same age and even comparable masses, using RV, transit photometry, direct imaging and spectroscopy,' the authors said.

Astronomers are still exploring how such an exotic system came to form in such a short timeframe, as the star is only 2.5 million years old - which is relatively young for a star.

It is possible the two planets interacted at some point in the past, scattering off one another and settling in their current extreme orbits.