OTS 44

OTS 44 is a free-floating planetary-mass object or brown dwarf located at 530 light-years (160 pc) in the constellation Chamaeleon near the reflection nebula IC 2631. It is among the lowest-mass free-floating substellar objects, with approximately 11.5 times the mass of Jupiter, or approximately 1.1% that of the Sun.^[3][4] Its radius is estimated to be 3.2 or 3.6 times that of Jupiter.^[3]

OTS 44

OTS 44 (orange crosshair) and surrounding nebulae
Observation data Epoch J2000.0      Equinox J2000.0
Constellation	Chamaeleon
Right ascension	11h 10m 11.5s
Declination	−76° 32′ 13″
Characteristics
Spectral type	M9.5[1]
Astrometry
Distance	530 ly (162.5 pc)[2]
Details
Mass	12[2] MJup
Radius	3.2 or 3.6[3] RJup
Luminosity	0.00126[3] – 0.0024[2] L☉
Temperature	1,700[3][2]–2,300[1] K
Age	1 – 6[3] Myr
Database references
SIMBAD	data

An artist's concept of OTS 44's dust disk

OTS 44 was discovered in 1998 by Oasa, Tamura, and Sugitani as a member of the star-forming region Chamaeleon I.^[5][6] Based upon infrared observations with the Spitzer Space Telescope and the Herschel Space Observatory, OTS 44 emits an excess of infrared radiation for an object of its type, suggesting it has a circumstellar disk of dust and particles of rock and ice.^[1][2][7] This disk (gas+dust) has a SED-fitted mass of at about 30 Earth masses.^[2] Observations with the SINFONI spectrograph at the Very Large Telescope show that the disk is accreting matter at the rate of approximately 10⁻¹¹ of the mass of the Sun per year.^[2] It could eventually develop into a planetary system. Observations with ALMA detected the disk in millimeter wavelengths. The observations constrained the dust mass of the disk between 0.07 and 0.63 M_🜨, but these mass estimates are limited by assumptions on poorly constrained parameters.^[8] Another work estimates the dust mass to 0.064 M_🜨 (5.2 M_☾) for dust particles of 1 mm in size and 0.295 M_🜨 (24 M_☾) for dust particles of 1 μm in size.^[9]

See also

• SCR 1845-6357, a binary system comprising a red dwarf and a brown dwarf
• Cha 110913-773444, an astronomical object that may be a free-floating planet surrounded by what appears to be a protoplanetary disk
• J1407b, an object possibly similar to OTS 44 that transited the star V1400 Centauri
• 2MASS J11151597+1937266, a relative nearby free-floating planetary-mass object with a disk
• KPNO-Tau 12, a low-mass brown dwarf or planetary-mass object with a disk