video This artist's impression shows the planet orbiting the star Alpha Centauri B, a member of the triple star system that is the closest to Earth in this image released on October 17, 2012 skysurvey.org/Handout/Reuters video Astronomy In a paper appearing Wednesday in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, French astronomers working with colleagues at the Universit de Montral said that their discovery opens exciting new perspectives in our scientific knowledge about planets beyond the solar system. "Intrinsically, they're interesting on a human level, as solitary planets in space," said Universit de Montral researcher Loc Albert. "But they can also be a proxy for the study of other planets. They can be models to help us study other objects that are harder to see." Until now, scientists researching planets outside the solar system made most of their discoveries through indirect observations, deducting the existence of those exo-planets through their impact on a star's brightness or movement. The newly discovered planet is, however, close and visible to telescopes, thus making it amenable to further detailed studies. The free-floating planet is part of a group of moving stars called AB Doradus Moving Group. Without the brightness of its own sun, it can only be seen in the infrared spectrum and was detected by data from the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope and the Chile-based European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope. The planet has been named CFBDSIR2149 (since it was discovered during a project called CFBDSIR, the abbreviation for Canada-France Brown Dwarfs Survey Infra Red.) CFBDSIR2149 is