At least 70 “lonely” dark ones exoplanets, which do not belong to a stellar system and do not move around a parent star, but orbit in space, “Free and beautiful”, but without the warmth and light of their sun, they discovered in galaxy our European astronomers.
According to APE BPE, this is the largest “batch” of such special planets, as so far only a few isolated cases had been discovered. Astronomers now estimate that there are many more such solitary exoplanets, called Free Floating Planets (FFPs), orbiting the universe, perhaps even billions.
The discovery – which nearly doubles the number of known starless exoplanets – was made with four telescopes from the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Chile (the Very Large Telescope-VLT, VISTA, VST and MPG / ESO), as well as thanks to telescopes in Hawaii (Subaru and others) and Arizona in the USA.
The researchers, led by the astronomer Nuria Mire-Rouag of the Astrophysics Laboratory of the University of Bordeaux in France and the University of Vienna, published in the journal Astronomy “Nature Astronomy”.
All the exoplanets found, mainly in Scorpio constellation, about 420 light-years from Earth, are large, having masses similar to those of Jupiter, the “giant” of our solar system.
Lonely exoplanets, moving too far away from any starlight to illuminate them, are very difficult to detect from telescopes (first discovered in the 1990s). Nevertheless, this time the “hunt” revealed a few to them.
“We did not know how long to wait we were excited “We found so many,” said Mire-Rouag.
Scenarios for creating FFPs
Scientists have not come up with a definitive explanation for how they are created such “unloaded” exoplanets.
Some astronomers believe that they can be formed by the gravitational collapse of a gas cloud, which is too small to form a star. Another possibility is that some planets will be eradicated from their parent star systems in vast space and now wander on their own.
The future more powerful telescopes, such as the ESO ELT under construction in the Atacama Desert of Chile that will begin its observations at the end of the decade, are expected to shed more light on the mysteries of these planets.
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