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Russia is fed up with cooperation with the US in space? It focuses on a “national” project. [OKO NA ŚWIAT]
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The process of planet formation has already been well understood by scientists over the past decades. Planets are formed from protoplanets, or creations “built” by gravity in protoplanetary disks revolving around newly formed stars. Most often, therefore, already formed planets remain close to their stars, circling with them a common center of mass.
They keep circling until their star dies, when they are (most often) destroyed. It is in case Earth, Mars, Jupiter and other planets of the solar system, which about 4.5 billion years ago formed around the young sun and orbit them to this day. However, the history of the planets is not always so rosy, as scientists now argue.
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Astronomers have discovered a group of over 70 solitary planets
An international team of astronomers using the European Southern Observatory (ESO) telescopes, the European Space Agency (ESA) Gaia probe and other observatories have just discovered a group of solitary exoplanets (exoplanets), i.e. those that … do not orbit any star.
As the researchers explain, there are “at least 70” planets in the group (their exact number is currently difficult to estimate, but at least 70) and were discovered in the star forming region of the Milky Way, relatively close to our solar system. Objects have masses comparable to that of Jupiter and move freely through space – that is, they are not gravitationally bound to stars.
We didn’t know how many [planet swobodnych – red.] we can expect and we are excited to find so many
– says the lead author of the study, astronomer Núria Miret-Roig, working for the Laboratoire d‘Astrophysique de Bordeaux in France and the University of Vienna in Austria.
Always mysterious and usually very dark. Researchers have found unique specimens
Scientists emphasize that the discovery of 70 free planets is an absolute record. So far, very few such objects have been discovered. All because they are extremely elusive and mysterious. They are not illuminated by stars and do not block the light of any of them, and thanks to the phenomenon of transit (the passage of a planet in front of its star, which causes a decrease in its observable brightness), we discover most “ordinary” planets.
In the case of solitary planets, researchers must use their gravitational influence on space-time or … hope for a bit of luck. In this case, the free planets were found because they were very young. They were created just a few million years ago and are still hot enough to emit small amounts of light.
The team of astronomers used in their search data collected during the trifle of 20 years of observation. The researchers explain that from among the tens of millions of light sources in the observed area, the extremely weak ones have been separated. They were then analyzed and found to be solitary.
We measured the slight movements, colors and brightness of tens of millions of sources over a large area of the sky. These measurements allowed us to accurately identify the weakest objects in this area – free planets
explains Miret-Roig.
How are lonely planets formed?
Researchers do not know how the group of objects just discovered was formed. Scientists assume, however, that free planets generally form in (possibly one of two ways – they form in the result a gas cloud collapsing too small to form a star, or they are not ejected from orbits around their parent stars until some time later. New the research is intended to help determine which of these models is more likely.
Astronomers talk about a breakthrough in the search for these types of objects, because the discovery shows that they are not uncommon in the Milky Way, as we may have thought so far. Hervé Bouy, one of the authors of the study, even claims that in our galaxy alone there may be as many as several billion lonely planets. It’s just that so far we haven’t been able to discover them.
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