The Planets - Wanderers

A team of astronomers, led by one of the pioneers ekzoplanetologii David Bennett, a professor at the University of Notre Dame (USA, Indiana ), announced the discovery of a new class of astronomical objects - dark yupiteropodobnyh extrasolar planets, gravitationally bound to the stars and drifting alone in space. Presumably, such a planet - strangers were thrown out of orbit their parent stars in the initial stage of formation of planetary systems.

The planets are in one gulp.
A pair of impressive battery life of eight telescopes, each demonstrated outstanding performance, finding for six months just ten extrasolar planets. None of them do not like our neighbors in the solar.

Detecting planets wanderers became possible due to the observational data 2006-2007, produced by Japan- New Zealand team of astronomers at the 1.8- meter telescope installed in the University Observatory, Mt John in New Zealand. During the year, astronomers scanned the group of stars in the central region of the Milky Way using microlensing, which allows to observe the dark compact objects sufficiently large mass, which are difficult to detect using already well run-in methods to detect extrasolar planets.



The three-year analysis of data obtained during these observations, allowed Bennett and his collaborators announced the discovery of Jupiter -class planets, ten, drifting freely through the central regions of our galaxy.



Guest of a dead galaxy.
Scientists have discovered the first exoplanet, owned by a star from another galaxy. Now it belongs to the star of the Milky Way, and once lived in an ancient star dwarf galaxy outside the. The study of this.

The authors do not exclude the possibility that some of these planets may be gravitationally bound to the parent star, revolving around a very distant orbits. However, the current theory of planet- and star formation, as well as data from other observations, are sufficient for statistical evaluation of such claims, leaving little room for such an explanation, as yupiteropodobnye gas giants at such a distant star orbits are extremely rare. More precisely,.



if part of the observed planets and is vysokoorbitalnyh exo- Jupiters, then there should be no more than two out of ten described.



In this case, the authors point out, detect the presence of their parent stars must further observations with space telescope ...



«Kepler turned to science fiction ...
In Kepler Space Telescope has failed. It happened the same day, when scientists released new data on the Kepler exoplanet search.

Opening of Bennett and co-workers not only confirms the existence of planets wanderers that had previously been the subject of bold speculation and science fiction, but also indicates a high prevalence of this kind of celestial bodies in our galaxy. And the fact that in this way were able to identify ten freely drifting in space objects, suggests that improved methods of detecting them is likely to be found even more, the authors emphasize.



Performing the calculations, a group of Bennett concluded that the population of the Milky Way planets Jupiter -class travelers about twice may exceed the stellar.



Habitable planet is not.
The existence of the first and only at the moment of potentially habitable exoplanet, Gliese 581g, once again called into question. As a result of re-treatment observations of this planetary system found.

Thus, freely drifting planet are not at all exotic and distributed in a galaxy not less than the 'classical' orbit, and further their observations can greatly contribute to correct ordinary baryonic matter, from which they are composed, in the mysterious dark matter - one of the major contemporary whetstones .

Existing hardware is not possible to observe the dark compact objects smaller than Jupiter and Saturn, the masses, but the theory does not exclude that the terrestrial planets and smaller classes, ejected from their parent star systems can also join a population of planets drifting through the galaxy.



To find out wandering through the universe of ...

TEXT: Dmitry Malianov.
PHOTO: NASA.





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