Astronomers have discovered at least 70 planets that appear to be wandering through space on their own. Due to a lack of light from a parent star, these "rogue" planets are difficult to notice, yet this is the biggest number discovered at once.
More than 80,000 observations located about 420 light-years from Earth, were analyzed by Hervé Bouy and his colleagues at the University of Bordeaux in France.
Because newly created worlds are still hot, they give off more light and are easier to discover. Such locations are suitable hunting grounds for rogue planets. Each is around Jupiter's mass. Planets do not orbit their own star despite their closeness to such stellar pressures.
Researchers detailed these solitary orbs in a research titled "A Rich Population of Free-Floating Planets in the Upper Scorpius Young Stellar Association."
At Least 70 'Rogue' Planets Spotted Moving in Space Without Stars
The researchers merged data from tens of thousands of wide-field photographs with data from multiple ground-based and space telescopes. Millions of sources emerged in the data, examining their mobility and brightness.
At least 70 rogue planets and up to 170 potential planets were discovered by the researchers. These free-floaters were discovered in a star-forming zone near the Sun in Scorpius and Ophiuchus's constellations.
"We did not know how many to expect and are excited to have found so many," Núria Miret-Roig, an astronomer at the Laboratoire d'Astrophysique de Bordeaux, France and the University of Vienna, Austria, and lead author of the new study, said in a statement.
According to the new discovery, there might be a lot more of these planets in the galaxy. Scientists aren't sure where they came from, though.
Rogue planets might have originated in the same manner as stars do, from a cloud of gas and dust, and live on their own, or they could have been previously a component of a star system before being evicted. Without a star to circle, these planets go about their business on their own, orbiting the galaxy's core like stars do.
Scientists to Make Another Complicated Technique to See More
The team wants to employ yet another complicated technique to examine the sky in the future. The Very Large Telescope has already been a boon to astronomy, but wait till you hear about the Extremely Large Telescope currently under construction in Chile's Atacama Desert.
This telescope might "become the first telescope to locate life outside our solar system," according to the team behind its creation. Its goal is to peek into the deepest reaches of space with ultra-high resolution, discover new planets, and possibly investigate the nature of the black cosmos.
"The ELT will be absolutely crucial to gathering more information about most of the rogue planets we have found," Bouy said per CNet. Maybe the recent discovery will finally explain why these weird events are so reclusive.
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