By Ron Cowen
The faint celestial object TMR-1C has had a checkered past — and now it has a checkered present.
![](https://i0.wp.com/www.sciencenews.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/12917.jpg?resize=192%2C300&ssl=1)
In 1998, NASA proclaimed that a picture taken of the body a year earlier with the Hubble Space Telescope — a fuzzy white dot — might go down in history as the first planet beyond the solar system to be photographed (SN: 6/6/98, p. 357). The discovery team, led by Susan Terebey, now at California State University, Los Angeles, suggested that the object’s location — at the end of a long, luminous filament emanating from two newborn stars — indicated that TMR-1C was a planet cast off by those incipient suns.
Many researchers were skeptical, noting that the apparent association between the object and the youthful stars might be a chance alignment on the sky. Only a year later Terebey herself declared that the body was too hot to be a planet and could be just an old background star (SN: 6/26/99, p. 404).
Now two independent studies, both set to appear in an upcoming Astronomy & Astrophysics, indicate that Terebey may have written off TMR-1C prematurely. Both reports provide evidence that the object is closely linked to the pair of youthful stars, which are likely members of the Taurus star-forming region some 450 light-years from Earth. While one of the studies suggests TMR-1C is just another low-mass star associated with the pair, the other suggests it could indeed be a planet.
“We may have to credit Terebey et al with finding a planet after all, but it is perhaps too soon to jump to that conclusion, just as it was too soon to discard the object as a planet 10 years ago,” says Eduardo Martin of the Centro de Astrobiologia in Madrid, a coauthor of one of the new studies. He and Basmah Riaz of the Instituto Astrofisica de Canarias in Tenerife, Spain, posted their findings online August 9.
Martin and Riaz compared observations they made with the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope atop Hawaii’s Mauna Kea in late 2002 and early 2009 with those recorded by Terebey and her colleagues earlier using the Hubble Space Telescope. The pair found that the object became much bluer between 1998 and 2002 and more than doubled its brightness between 1998 and 2009.