It’s gotta be pretty lonely out there. What’s a planet to do?
I think that planet’s parents have a LOT to answer for - who calls their kid CFBDSIR2149? I mean, really, it is no wonder the planet is lonely. It’s bad enough being called something silly like Zebadiah or Eustace or Priscilla but CFBDSIR2149 is just an invitation to bullies. I bet it just got so sick of the other planets in its solar system, all of which were named after Roman gods or something equally cool, laughing at it that it had no choice but to leave.
I’m serious, those parents should be prosecuted for planet abuse.
What the homeless need more than anything else is what everyone needs first…
…merely a place to be.
How the hell did they establish it’s existence without it being close to any other gravitational body or transiting across a star, ie the usual method? I’m not saying they didn’t but the mechanical explanation of the situation would be interesting to us plebs? Bloody pop science.
either this article is old, or misinformed. we’ve known about planets like that for a while, i read an article about some a few weeks ago
Personally, at 400c, I’d call it a dwarf star… but what do I know 
Yeah planet tends to denote a parent star, which tends to mean you have some sort of gravitational influence, which is where I was coming from. If it’s just a star that is viewable by X-rays or the visible spectrum or whatever it would be nice to know how exactly they went about it.
Exactly what do I know, would like to know some more thanks. 
Cool quote it maybe?
We stop calling it a “star” when it loses so much of its radiant energy that it is more of a big hot rock than a burning fission.
Fusion you mean. 
I read it in print
Isn’t everything also on line also these days, a fuck it I’ll look it up, being lazy.
No.
Yes.
I know the difference captaincrunk but thanks anyway.
Well… that answers my last question 
Which brings me to a next thought… what makes stars remain in a fixed position? their mass and density?
Nothing they aren’t, every action has an equal and opposite reaction so if a planet is traversing around a star it will cause the sun to wobble, more mass more wobble. Incidentally that’s how we usually detect planets, not directly but by seeing how much a star moves but this only works for some stars, for planets that transit their star we use the dimming of the star to determine the planets size and possible mass. The math for wobble and planet mass is not that complicated actually it’s an extension of Kepler’s laws and can be taught to high school kids.
Our star is also moving around the galaxies center as well. It orbits roughly every 230 million years. Our Galaxy is on a collision course with Andromeda. In fact there is no fixed point in the universe, but that’s another story.
Oh, shit. Better buckle up! 
Actually, from what I understand, the actual number of planet-to-planet, star-to-star collisions will be almost nill. It’s like throwing a handful of sand at another airborne handful of sand. Very few grains actually hit each other.
However, I wonder if the gravitational disturbances would shake up the stability of our solar system enough to endanger (or totally annihilate) life on Earth. Does anybody know?
No I hear there are one or two outcomes, the diffuse nature of galaxies mean nothing will happen to us. Or we will get flung out of our orbit into the cosmic void by gravitational interactions, or if we are unlucky enough to get flung towards the center get eaten up by our super massive black hole in the center of our galaxy. We’re going to miss the buggers center briefly touching only at the edges, but that will be enough to sling shot us around so that afterwards we combine fully. If nothing else it’s going to be one hell of a night time light show.
That said the way gravity stands now, I doubt we will know for sure if we have to hit in a few billion years. But I would not worry too much, as one Scientist said when he asked about this by a layman, did you say in a few million years or billion, he replied billion and she said that’s alright then. 
Million or billion. As if there’s a huge difference to us fragile mortals.
so its a star and a planet?