European astronomers have discovered in our galaxy at least 70 “outcast” dark exoplanets, which do not belong to a stellar system and do not move around a mother star, but roam alone in space, “free and beautiful”, but without the warmth and light of their sun.
This is the largest “batch” of such particular planets, as so far only a few isolated cases have 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 telescopes. in Hawaii (Subaru and others) and Arizona in the USA.
The researchers, led by astronomer Nuria Mire-Rouag of the Astrophysics Laboratory at the University of Bordeaux in France and the University of Vienna, published the paper in the journal Nature Astronomy. All the exoplanets found, mainly in the constellation of Scorpio at a distance of about 420 light-years from Earth, are large, having masses similar to Jupiter, the “giant” of our solar system.
Lonely exoplanets, moving too far away from any starlight to illuminate them, are very difficult to detect by telescopes (first discovered in the 1990s). Nevertheless, this time the “hunt” revealed a few to them. “We did not know how long to wait and we were really excited to find so many,” said Mire-Rouag.
Scientists have not come up with a definitive explanation for how such “unloaded” exoplanets are created. 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.
Future more powerful telescopes, such as the ESO Ultra-Large Telescope (ELT) under construction in the Atacama Desert, Chile, which will begin observations later this decade, are expected to shed more light on the mysteries of these planets.
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