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| Main image: An artist’s interpretation of a rogue planet with the Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex in the background. Vendor: University of Bordeaux / ESO. |
A group of astronomers has discovered at least 70 new rogue planets. There could even be up to 170 rogue, or free-floating (FFP) planets. It was the largest group of rogue planets discovered at the same time.
New study outlines already existing research published year Natural Astronomy. The first author, Núria Miret-Roig, was an astronomer at the Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Bordeaux, France, and the University of Vienna, Austria. Miret-Roig said, ‘We had no idea how many people were expecting and delighted to have found so many.’
To find so many rogue planets, the team worked on about 20 years of data from various telescopes, including those of the European Southern Observatory (ESO). “We measured the small movements, color and brightness of tens of millions of sources over a large area of the sky,” said Miret-Roig. ‘These measurements allow us to safely identify the faintest objects in this region, rogue planets.’ Fake planets are very elusive. Their mass is similar to that of the planets in our Solar System, but without an orbiting star, rogue planets are extremely difficult to detect.
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| The very small red dot in the center of this image (click to enlarge) is a recently discovered rogue planet, located in the area of sky occupied by Upper Scorpius and Ophiucus. Credit: University of Bordeaux / ESO |
Follow Newsletter ESO, the team used observational data from ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), the Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA), the VLT Survey Telescope (VST), and the telescope. 2.2 meter MPG/ESO telescope in Chile. ‘The bulk of our data comes from ESO observatories, which is absolutely critical to this study. Hervé Bouy, an astronomer at the Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Bordeaux, France, and project leader of the new study, said. ‘We used tens of thousands of wide-field images from ESO facilities, representing literally hundreds of hours of observations and literally tens of terabytes of data.’ The team also used data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia Satellite, a space-based telescope. Combining data from ground-based and space-based telescopes for new research is an important opportunity.
What makes a rogue planet so hard to find? A rogue planet is very far from the stars, so rogue planets are very dark and difficult to visualize. However, for several million years after they form, rogue planets still glow, so they can be detected by sensitive cameras on large telescopes. The planets Miret-Roig and her team found are about the same mass as Jupiter, and the planets the team found are in the constellations Scorpius and Ophiuchus.
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| This image shows the locations of 115 possible rogue planets, noted by the red circles. The exact number of rogue planets the team detected ranged from 70 to 170, depending on the assumed age for the area studied. This image assumes average age. Credit: University of Bordeaux / ESO |
A previous study by US scientists claimed that the Milky Way could be home to more than 100 billion free-floating planets. Bouy added: “There could be several billion of these free-floating giant planets freely moving in the Milky Way without a host star. By studying newly located rogue planets, astronomers hope to learn more about planet formation. Currently, there are two basic theories about rogue planet formation. Some people believe that planets form from a collapsing gas cloud that is too small to form a star. Others think the rogue planets could be planets that have somehow broken out of the parent system. The team’s paper outlines that they have found a rogue planetary excess of up to a factor of seven, which suggests that other formation mechanisms may be at work and also adds credibility to the theory. planetary launch.
State-of-the-art technology will support rogue planet discovery and research, including ESO’s new Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), currently under construction in Chile’s Atacama Desert. ELT will begin observing later this decade. “These objects are extremely faint and it is possible to study them with very little current facilities,” says Bouy. ‘ELT will be absolutely crucial in gathering more information about most of the rogue planets we have found.’
