The discovery of the pair was announced in a 2006 Science article by Ray Jayawardhana and Valentin D. Ivanov .

Despite the acronym "Oph" appearing in its name (implying that it may belong to the young Ophiuchus molecular cloud), Oph1622 is likely to be older than its originally adopted age of 1 million years.

More likely, it is a member of the Upper Scorpius subgroup of the Scorpius–Centaurus association, which has an age of 11 million years.

[4] For an adopted age of 11 million years, the system has inferred masses of 53 and 21 Jupiter masses,[4] similar to that derived by Luhman et al.[3] The distance between the two is approximately 240 AU—a distance so great that Space.com wrote that "their connection is so tenuous ... that a passing star or brown dwarf could permanently separate the two objects."

As such, the discovery was reported as casting doubt on the theory that such free-floating planet-like objects have been ejected from a stellar system, such an event being too violent to leave them in such a wide orbit around each other.