Scientists have found that planets with no parent star can be born freely, outside of an existing solar system — and there are 200 billion of them in our galaxy.
New observations show that not all free-floating planets were thrown out of existing planetary systems. They can also be born free.
Research has shown that there may be as many as 200 billion free-floating planets in our galaxy, the Milky Way.
Until now scientists have believed that such “rogue planets,” which do not orbit around a star, must have been ejected from existing planetary systems.
The discovery of tiny dark clouds in space point out another possibility: that some free-floating planets formed on their own, researchers said.
Astronomers from Sweden and Finland used several telescopes to observe the Rosette Nebula, a huge cloud of gas and dust 4600 light years from Earth in the constellation Monoceros.
“The Rosette Nebula is home to more than a hundred of these tiny clouds — we call them globulettes,” said Gosta Gahm, astronomer at Stockholm University, who led the project.
“They are very small, each with diameter less than 50 times the distance between the Sun and Neptune. Previously we were able to estimate that most of them are of planetary mass, less than 13 times Jupiter’s mass. Now we have much more reliable measures of mass and density for a large number of these objects, and we have also precisely measured how fast they are moving relative to their environment,” he said.
“We found that the globulettes are very dense and compact, and many of them have very dense cores. That tells us that many of them will collapse under their own weight and form free-floating planets. The most massive of them can form so-called brown dwarfs,” said team member Carina Persson, astronomer at Chalmers University of Technology.
Brown dwarfs, sometimes called failed stars, are bodies whose mass lies between that of planets and stars.
The study shows that the tiny clouds are moving outwards through the Rosette Nebula at high speed, about 80,000 kilometres per hour.
“We think that these small, round clouds have broken off from tall, dusty pillars of gas which were sculpted by the intense radiation from young stars. They have been accelerated out from the centre of the nebula thanks to pressure from radiation from the hot stars in its centre,” explains Minja Makela, astronomer at the University of Helsinki.
According to Gahm and his team, the tiny dark clouds are being thrown out of the Rosette Nebula. During the history of the Milky Way, countless millions of nebulae like the Rosette have bloomed and faded away. In all of these, many globulettes would have formed.
“There are so many of them that they could be a significant source of the free-floating planets that have been discovered in recent years,” Gahm said.