[KootenayFlamesFan]

A planet thought to have been free floating in space is actually in a colossal orbit around a star 1 trillion kilometers away.

That's according to a team of astronomers in the UK, U.S. and Australia, who revealed this week that snappily-named planet 2MASS J2126 is in an orbit around its star 7,000-times the size of Earth's orbit around the sun.

Previously it had been thought that 2MASS J2126 was a free-floating or "rogue" planet, adrift in the depths of space untethered to any star.

However, observations of the star and planet revealed that the two were moving through space together and appeared to be associated.

"How such a wide planetary system forms and survives remains an open question," Simon Murphy of Australian National University said in a statement.

At 1 trillion kilometers from its parent star, 2MASS J2126 has the widest orbit of any planet found, one that takes nearly 900,000 years to complete.

http://www.cnn.com/2016/01/27/world/...tem/index.html