Post by auntym on Nov 15, 2012 12:11:06 GMT -6
www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2012/11/lost-rogue-planet-found-floating-in-space-100-light-years-distant.html
November 14, 2012
New Lost Planet Found Floating in Space 100 Light Years Away
Astronomers using ESO’s Very Large Telescope and the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope have identified a body that is very probably a planet wandering through space without a parent star. These worlds could be common — perhaps as numerous as normal stars. This is the most exciting free-floating planet candidate so far and the closest such object to the Solar System at a distance of about 100 light-years.
Its comparative proximity, and the absence of a bright star very close to it, has allowed the team to study its atmosphere in great detail. This object also gives astronomers a preview of the exoplanets that future instruments aim to image around stars other than the Sun.
“Looking for planets around their stars is akin to studying a firefly sitting one centimetre away from a distant, powerful car headlight,” says Philippe Delorme (Institut de planétologie et d’astrophysique de Grenoble, CNRS/Université Joseph Fourier, France), lead author of the new study. “This nearby free-floating object offered the opportunity to study the firefly in detail without the dazzling lights of the car messing everything up.”
Free-floating planets are planetary-mass objects that roam through space without any ties to a star. Possible examples of such objects have been found before, but without knowing their ages, it was not possible for astronomers to know whether they were really planets or brown dwarfs — “failed” stars that lack the bulk to trigger the reactions that make stars shine.
These rogue objects started to become known in the 1990s, when astronomers found that the point at which a brown dwarf crosses over into the planetary mass range is difficult to determine. More recent studies have suggested that there may be huge numbers of these little bodies in our galaxy, a population numbering almost twice as many as the main sequence stars present.
But astronomers have now discovered an object, labelled CFBDSIR2149, that seems to be part of a nearby stream of young stars known as the AB Doradus Moving Group. The object was identified as part of an infrared extension of the Canada-France Brown Dwarfs Survey (CFBDS), a project hunting for cool brown dwarf stars. The researchers found the object in observations from the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope and harnessed the power of ESO’s Very Large Telescope to examine its properties.
CONTINUE READING: www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2012/11/lost-rogue-planet-found-floating-in-space-100-light-years-distant.html
November 14, 2012
New Lost Planet Found Floating in Space 100 Light Years Away
Astronomers using ESO’s Very Large Telescope and the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope have identified a body that is very probably a planet wandering through space without a parent star. These worlds could be common — perhaps as numerous as normal stars. This is the most exciting free-floating planet candidate so far and the closest such object to the Solar System at a distance of about 100 light-years.
Its comparative proximity, and the absence of a bright star very close to it, has allowed the team to study its atmosphere in great detail. This object also gives astronomers a preview of the exoplanets that future instruments aim to image around stars other than the Sun.
“Looking for planets around their stars is akin to studying a firefly sitting one centimetre away from a distant, powerful car headlight,” says Philippe Delorme (Institut de planétologie et d’astrophysique de Grenoble, CNRS/Université Joseph Fourier, France), lead author of the new study. “This nearby free-floating object offered the opportunity to study the firefly in detail without the dazzling lights of the car messing everything up.”
Free-floating planets are planetary-mass objects that roam through space without any ties to a star. Possible examples of such objects have been found before, but without knowing their ages, it was not possible for astronomers to know whether they were really planets or brown dwarfs — “failed” stars that lack the bulk to trigger the reactions that make stars shine.
These rogue objects started to become known in the 1990s, when astronomers found that the point at which a brown dwarf crosses over into the planetary mass range is difficult to determine. More recent studies have suggested that there may be huge numbers of these little bodies in our galaxy, a population numbering almost twice as many as the main sequence stars present.
But astronomers have now discovered an object, labelled CFBDSIR2149, that seems to be part of a nearby stream of young stars known as the AB Doradus Moving Group. The object was identified as part of an infrared extension of the Canada-France Brown Dwarfs Survey (CFBDS), a project hunting for cool brown dwarf stars. The researchers found the object in observations from the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope and harnessed the power of ESO’s Very Large Telescope to examine its properties.
CONTINUE READING: www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2012/11/lost-rogue-planet-found-floating-in-space-100-light-years-distant.html