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Planet profiles

Oph 11 b

Brown Dwarf · 443 light-years away · Last reviewed October 15, 2026

Oph 11 b rendered in TerraForge from its measured mass, orbit and star
TerraForge's rendering of Oph 11 b, generated by our physics engine from its measured mass, size, orbit and star. An illustration of what the science suggests, not a photograph.
TerraForge classification
Brown Dwarf
Host star
Oph 11 (M9)
Distance
443 light-years
Orbit
7,300,000 days
Mass
4,450 × Earth
Radius
12.3 × Earth
Discovered
2006, imaging

Figures from the NASA Exoplanet Archive. The classification is TerraForge’s, from its physics model.

Oph 11 b is the fainter half of a very wide, very low-mass pair of objects, also known as Oph 1622-2405, and whether it counts as a planet is disputed. The pair are separated by about 243 times Earth's distance from the Sun, then the widest known separation for a binary of such low mass. The NASA Exoplanet Archive lists the fainter one as a planet of about 14 Jupiter masses, about 440 light-years away.

The pair caught attention in 2006, when Ray Jayawardhana and V. Ivanov estimated masses of about 13 to 15 and 7 to 8 Jupiter masses: two planet-mass objects orbiting each other with no star. Other astronomers soon disagreed. Later in 2006 a team led by Laird Close, using the Keck telescope's adaptive optics, took the first separate spectra of the two and estimated 17 and 14 Jupiter masses, concluding the system is unlikely to be a planetary-mass binary, though it has one of the lowest masses and weakest gravitational bonds of any binary known.

In 2007 a team led by K. L. Luhman went further. Their spectra gave later spectral types for both objects than earlier work, implying masses of about 0.055 and 0.019 solar masses, roughly 58 and 20 Jupiter masses, well above the masses of known planets. They also found the pair older than first thought, closer to the Upper Scorpius group than to the young Ophiuchus cloud it appears against. The answer depends on the models used to turn brightness into mass, which are least certain for very young objects. Close's team suggested that wide, fragile pairs like this one tend to be pulled apart as they age.

Sources

  1. The Wide Brown Dwarf Binary Oph 1622-2405 and Discovery of A Wide, Low Mass Binary in Ophiuchus (Oph 1623-2402): A New Class of Young Evaporating Wide Binaries? — arXiv (The Astrophysical Journal)
  2. Oph 1622-2405: Not a Planetary-Mass Binary — arXiv (The Astrophysical Journal Letters)
A banded gas giant with four moons in different colors: a yellow sulfur moon, two rust-red rock moons and a blue water moon

New: Choose What Your Moons Are Made Of 🌙

Every moon used to be grey rock, white ice or blue ocean, decided for you. Now each one has a "Made of" choice in the builder's Moons tab — silicate rock, iron, water ice, carbon, sulfur, or nitrogen and methane ice — and the physics decides what that becomes. Put water ice too close to the star and it boils off to bare rock. Put sulfur where a neighbouring moon keeps it tidally flexed and it erupts in Io's yellows. Give a Titan-sized moon nitrogen ice far from the sun and it wraps itself in haze. Hang a water moon about the mass of Earth off a giant planet in the habitable zone and it can hold air and open seas — scored for life on the same scale as a planet, with a day as long as its orbit. A tint slider nudges the colour, but only as far as that material could really go.

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