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| Science & Technology |
| Astronomers discover many interstellar planets |
| 2021-12-23 |
| Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited. [RIA Novosti] In the Upper Scorpio stellar association closest to the Sun, astronomers using telescopes from the European Southern Observatory (ESO) have identified about a hundred planets moving freely in space, rather than revolving around specific stars. All in all, in our Galaxy, according to scientists, there must be billions of such interstellar planets, or rogue planets. The results of the study are published in the journal Nature Astronomy. Interstellar planets have been known for about twenty years, but so far no systematic research has been carried out to find and study them. This is due to the fact that they cannot be detected using traditional observation methods, since they are not associated with any stars and are not illuminated by them. Researchers from France , Spain and Japan analyzed about a hundred terabytes of data obtained over twenty years of observations of the best infrared and optical telescopes: the VLT Very Large Telescope, the VISTA Observation Telescope in the Visible and Infrared Spectrum, the VLT Wide Field of View Telescope (VST) and "The vast majority of the data that was critical to this study came from ESO observatories," project manager Herve Bouy of the Astrophysics Laboratory of the University of Bordeaux in France said in a press release. "We used tens of thousands of wide-angle images from objects ESO corresponding to hundreds of hours of observation." A map of the motion of the stars of the Milky Way, built using data from the Gaia space observatory. Black and magenta represent areas of significant movement, yellow represent areas of relatively little movement. Large-scale filamentous disk structures in the middle plane of the Galaxy are highlighted by lines. Bottom left - satellites of the Magellanic Clouds, right - torn apart Sagittarius dwarf galaxy In their search, the authors were guided by the assumption that, several million years after their formation, rogue planets with a mass comparable to that of Jupiter are still hot enough to be directly detected using the sensitive infrared cameras of large telescopes. As a result, after the introduction of corrections for the background light of stars and galaxies, only in the association of young stars of Upper Scorpio closest to the Sun, the researchers identified from 70 to 170, depending on the selection criteria used, such objects, as well as more than three thousand candidates for rogue planets. "We measured the smallest movements, as well as the color and brightness of tens of millions of sources over a large area of ​​the sky," explains the first author of the article, Nuria Miret-Roig. "These measurements allowed us to reliably identify the faintest objects in this region - the planets "Outcasts. We didn't know how many there would be, and we're very glad we found so many." Extrapolation to the rest of the Milky Way galaxy suggests that it contains billions of interstellar planets, the origin of which remains a mystery. The researchers believe that such a huge number of rogue planets could not have formed as a result of the compression of the material of small gas clouds in interstellar space. Most likely, according to the authors, these planets originally formed around stars, and then were thrown out of their parent system. |
| Posted by:badanov |
| #1 Wandering Earth |
| Posted by: Skidmark 2021-12-23 08:09 |