Astronomers find first evidence of orphaned planets

William Atkins
Thursday, 19 May 2011 23:29

Science - Space

In a project carried out out by an international team of astronomers with a telescope in New Zealand , a new class of planets has been found out in the universe: planets that do not orbit stars, but float freely out in space.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) funded the Japan-New Zealand survey, which was conducted in 2006 and 2007.

The survey looked at the galactic bulge at the center of our Milky Way galaxy, the tightly packed (highly concentrated) bunch of stars that is found at the center of most spiral galaxies.

For their search, the astronomers used the 1.8-meter (5.9-foot) Microlensing Observations in Astrophysics (MOA) telescope at Mount John University Observatory in New Zealand.

What the astronomers discovered were a new class of planets around the size of the planet Jupiter. They are called isolated orbs, orphan planets, or free-floating planets.

A free-floating planet is any object in the universe that has an equivalent mass to a planet, in this case the planet Jupiter, but is not gravitationally bound to any star, brown dwarf, or other such object, Instead, it orbits a galaxy directly.

They also found that these planets are floating freely in space, without orbiting a star. Astronomers conjecture that they are outcasts from developing planetary systems.

This international team of astronomers estimates that the number of these orphaned planets could outnumber orbiting planets, such as Earth, by twice their numbers.

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