Scientists discover solar system three times wider than the next biggest one

By Lulu Chang Published January 28, 2016

If ever you feel too big for your britches, or just want to be dwarfed by the vastness of the universe, consider this — scientists have just discovered the largest solar system to date, and it’s so big that one of its alien planets takes 900,000 years or so to complete one orbit around its sun. Our own Pluto (which has been downgraded to a dwarf planet), takes a mere 248 years. The exoplanet in question is a stunning 7,000 astronomical units (AUs) away from its central star (where one AU is the distance from Earth to the sun, or about 1 trillion kilometers).

These distances put those of our own solar system to shame — Pluto, which seems pretty far away, is actually a mere 40 AU from the sun. And the exoplanet itself, dubbed 2MASS J2126, is enormous, with a mass that is somewhere between 12 and 15 times that of Jupiter. Scientists further say the entire makeup of this solar system and planet is different from ours.

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“We were very surprised to find such a low-mass object so far from its parent star,” said Dr Simon Murphy from the Australian National University (ANU). “There is no way it formed in the same way as our solar system did, from a large disc of dust and gas.”

For quite some time, scientists mistakenly thought 2MASS J2126 was a rogue planet, floating off on its own in the far reaches of the universe. And understandably so — the BBC notes that this newly discovered system is almost “three times the size of the previous widest star-planet pair.”

“This is the widest planet system found so far and both the members of it have been known for eight years, but nobody had made the link between the objects before,” said lead author Dr. Niall Deacon of the University of Hertfordshire in a statement about the findings. “The planet is not quite as lonely as we first thought, but it’s certainly in a very long distance relationship.”

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News

Scientists figure out why Venus’ atmosphere rotates 60x faster than the planet

The planet Venus.

The planet Venus has some strange characteristics, but one of its oddest features is its atmosphere. Full of clouds of sulfuric acid, its thick atmosphere hides the surface of the planet and heats it so much that even though it's further from the sun than Mercury, it is the hottest planet in the solar system. And strangest of all, even though the planet itself rotates slowly, its atmosphere whips around and rotates incredibly fast.

A Venusian day, which is one full rotation of the planet, takes 243 Earth days, but its atmosphere rotates 60 times faster than this, with the top of the clouds rotating all the way around the planet in just four Earth days. And as you look higher in the atmosphere, the rotation becomes faster. This phenomenon, called superrotation, was first discovered in the 1960s but until now, scientists have been puzzled as to what caused it.

Computing

Google Gemini’s best AI tricks finally land on Microsoft Copilot

Copilot app for Mac

Microsoft’s Copilot had a rather splashy AI upgrade fest at the company’s recent event. Microsoft made a total of nine product announcements, which include the agentic trick called Actions, Memory, Vision, Pages, Shopping, and Copilot Search.

A healthy few have already appeared on rival AI products such as Google’s Gemini and OpenAI’s ChatGPT, alongside much smaller players like Perplexity and browser-maker Opera. However, two products that have found some vocal fan-following with Gemini and ChatGPT have finally landed on the Copilot platform.

Cars

Rivian set to unlock unmapped roads for Gen2 vehicles

rivian unmapped roads gen2 r1t gallery image 0

Rivian fans rejoice! Just a few weeks ago, Rivian rolled out automated, hands-off driving for its second-gen R1 vehicles with a game-changing software update. Yet, the new feature, which is only operational on mapped highways, had left many fans craving for more.
Now the company, which prides itself on listening to - and delivering on - what its customers want, didn’t wait long to signal a ‘map-free’ upgrade will be available later this year.
“One feedback we’ve heard loud and clear is that customers love [Highway Assist] but they want to use it in more places,” James Philbin, Rivian VP of autonomy, said on the podcast RivianTrackr Hangouts. “So that’s something kind of exciting we’re working on, we’re calling it internally ‘Map Free’, that we’re targeting for later this year.”
The lag between the release of Highway Assist (HWA) and Map Free automated driving gives time for the fleet of Rivian vehicles to gather ‘unique events’. These events are used to train Rivian’s offline model in the cloud before data is distilled back to individual vehicles.
As Rivian founder and CEO RJ Scaringe explained in early March, HWA marked the very beginning of an expanding automated-driving feature set, “going from highways to surface roads, to turn-by-turn.”
For now, HWA still requires drivers to keep their eyes on the road. The system will send alerts if you drift too long without paying attention. But stay tuned—eyes-off driving is set for 2026.
It’s also part of what Rivian calls its “Giving you your time back” philosophy, the first of three pillars supporting Rivian’s vision over the next three to five years. Philbin says that philosophy is focused on “meeting drivers where they are”, as opposed to chasing full automation in the way other automakers, such as Tesla’s robotaxi, might be doing.
“We recognize a lot of people buy Rivians to go on these adventures, to have these amazing trips. They want to drive, and we want to let them drive,” Philbin says. “But there’s a lot of other driving that’s very monotonous, very boring, like on the highway. There, giving you your time back is how we can give the best experience.”
This will also eventually lead to the third pillar of Rivian’s vision, which is delivering Level 4, or high-automation vehicles: Those will offer features such as auto park or auto valet, where you can get out of your Rivian at the office, or at the airport, and it goes off and parks itself.
While not promising anything, Philbin says he believes the current Gen 2 hardware and platforms should be able to support these upcoming features.
The second pillar for Rivian is its focus on active safety features, as the EV-maker rewrote its entire autonomous vehicle (AV) system for its Gen2 models. This focus allowed Rivian’s R1T to be the only large truck in North America to get a Top Safety Pick+ from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.
“I believe there’s a lot of innovation in the active safety space, in terms of making those features more capable and preventing more accidents,” Philbin says. “Really the goal, the north star goal, would be to have Rivian be one of the safest vehicles on the road, not only for the occupants but also for other road users.”