Telescope catches 70 planets 'born out of nowhere'

In a mysterious star-forming region located in the constellations of Scorpio and Ophiuchus, there are at least 70 planets in a free-floating state, unbound by any sun.

According to Sci-News, the above amazing results were determined from a 20-year data set collected by the observatories of NSF's NOIRLab, the European Southern Observatory (ESO), the Canadian Telescope - France - Hawaii and the Subaru Telescope, featuring more than 80,000 clear images of space 420 light-years from Earth.

A "wandering planet"

Called the Young Shangtian Star Link, this star-forming region has at least 70 planets - and possibly up to 170 - free-floating. It is a completely mysterious type of planet that has been discovered more and more in recent years, with a mass not exceeding 13 times that of Jupiter.

Most regular planets are like our Earth: born from the protoplanetary disk of a parent star and associated for the rest of its life with the parent star. But this type of floating planet is not.

They are somewhat "advanced" objects than planets, but are not large enough and do not have the right fusion reaction to be considered a star. And they appear to be "born out of nowhere," that is, directly formed from the molecular clouds that contain them.

Because they are not illuminated by their parent stars, these planets are very dim, and become dimmer with age. So most of the floating planets were observed when they were young.

According to Dr. Núria Miret-Roig, an astronomer from the Bordeaux Astrophysics Laboratory and the University of Vienna, one of the study's lead authors, they didn't expect to find many floating planets. position.

The discovery leads researchers to believe that the galaxy containing the Earth's Milky Way could be filled with this planet-like mass - by several billion.