Post by auntym on Jul 28, 2017 20:07:31 GMT -6
www.scientificamerican.com/article/wandering-in-the-void-billions-of-rogue-planets-without-a-home/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=sa-editorial-social&utm_content=image-post&utm_term=space_news_text_free&sf101938686=1
Wandering in the Void, Billions of Rogue Planets without a Home
New results suggest free-floating giant planets are less common than previously believed, but hint at vast numbers of smaller castaway worlds
By Lee Billings / www.scientificamerican.com/author/lee-billings/
July 24, 2017
Artist's rendition of a Jupiter-sized rogue planet, floating freely through interstellar space without a parent star. Credit: NASA, JPL-Caltech
Not all planets have a home. For decades, astronomers and science fiction authors alike have speculated about orphaned orbs cast adrift from their home stars, endlessly wandering the boundless reaches of interstellar space. Most theorists hold that such ejections should be quite common during the chaotic tumult of a planetary system’s early days, when closely-packed worlds whirling around a star can scatter off each other like billiard balls in a break shot. Studying the properties of these far-flung planetary nomads—their numbers, masses and trajectories—could allow scientists to reconstruct these bodies’ murky origins and peer into a crucial formative stage of planetary systems that is otherwise largely hidden to us.
Hard evidence for this population of planetary nomads has proved elusive—floating cold and lightless in the void, these dark worlds cannot be directly observed by any conceivable telescope. Very rarely, however, one might pass in front of a far-distant background star, creating a detectable blip of light as the planet’s gravitational field acts as a magnifying lens. The duration and strength of such a “gravitational microlensing” event could reveal not only a rogue planet’s existence but also its mass, as bigger worlds tend to create longer, stronger amplifications of a background star’s light. A typical free-floating Jupiter-mass planet, for instance, is estimated to create an amplification lasting one to several days. A smaller, Earth-sized object might only amplify a star for a few hours.
It takes intensive calculations and a complicated series of assumptions to extract a rogue planet’s basic details from the deceptively simple brightening of faraway stars. But experts broadly agree that it can be done—so a handful of telescopic surveys around the world now monitor hundreds of millions of suns night after night to seek these objects, gradually taking a bulk census of the Milky Way’s loneliest worlds from the telltale twinkles of chance cosmic alignments.
The latest results of that census appeared on Monday in Nature, and come from Poland’s Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment (OGLE), a 1.3-meter telescope in Chile. Based on a statistical analysis of more than 2,600 microlensing events, drawn from six years of observations on about 50 million stars, the OGLE team estimates that there is perhaps one Jupiter-mass rogue planet for every four stars in the galaxy. This result meshes well with leading planet-formation theories and more conventional observations of other planetary systems, and appears to refute the previous best guess from a competing team that estimated rogue Jupiters should be roughly twice as common as stars. (Neither result is anything for Earthlings to fret about—space is so huge that the chances of a rogue planet wandering close enough to our solar system to cause harm are, well, astronomically low.)
“Our new microlensing observations are in agreement with theoretical expectations on the frequency of free-floating Jupiters, and with infrared surveys for planetary-mass objects in star-forming regions,” says Przemek Mróz, lead author of the OGLE paper and an astronomer at the University of Warsaw Observatory in Poland. “We found that Jupiter-mass planets are at least 10 times less frequent than previously thought.”
Those earlier estimates of giant rogue planets being twice as common as stars sent shockwaves through the astronomical community when they emerged in a 2011 Nature paper from the Microlensing Observations in Astrophysics (MOA) survey, which uses a 1.8-meter telescope in New Zealand. “Very few of us in the microlensing field believed the original MOA results, simply because they were so difficult to reconcile with other observations and theory,” says Scott Gaudi, an astronomer at The Ohio State University. “But it was hard to know what was causing the apparent excess of events.”
CONTINUE READING: www.scientificamerican.com/article/wandering-in-the-void-billions-of-rogue-planets-without-a-home/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=sa-editorial-social&utm_content=image-post&utm_term=space_news_text_free&sf101938686=1
Wandering in the Void, Billions of Rogue Planets without a Home
New results suggest free-floating giant planets are less common than previously believed, but hint at vast numbers of smaller castaway worlds
By Lee Billings / www.scientificamerican.com/author/lee-billings/
July 24, 2017
Artist's rendition of a Jupiter-sized rogue planet, floating freely through interstellar space without a parent star. Credit: NASA, JPL-Caltech
Not all planets have a home. For decades, astronomers and science fiction authors alike have speculated about orphaned orbs cast adrift from their home stars, endlessly wandering the boundless reaches of interstellar space. Most theorists hold that such ejections should be quite common during the chaotic tumult of a planetary system’s early days, when closely-packed worlds whirling around a star can scatter off each other like billiard balls in a break shot. Studying the properties of these far-flung planetary nomads—their numbers, masses and trajectories—could allow scientists to reconstruct these bodies’ murky origins and peer into a crucial formative stage of planetary systems that is otherwise largely hidden to us.
Hard evidence for this population of planetary nomads has proved elusive—floating cold and lightless in the void, these dark worlds cannot be directly observed by any conceivable telescope. Very rarely, however, one might pass in front of a far-distant background star, creating a detectable blip of light as the planet’s gravitational field acts as a magnifying lens. The duration and strength of such a “gravitational microlensing” event could reveal not only a rogue planet’s existence but also its mass, as bigger worlds tend to create longer, stronger amplifications of a background star’s light. A typical free-floating Jupiter-mass planet, for instance, is estimated to create an amplification lasting one to several days. A smaller, Earth-sized object might only amplify a star for a few hours.
It takes intensive calculations and a complicated series of assumptions to extract a rogue planet’s basic details from the deceptively simple brightening of faraway stars. But experts broadly agree that it can be done—so a handful of telescopic surveys around the world now monitor hundreds of millions of suns night after night to seek these objects, gradually taking a bulk census of the Milky Way’s loneliest worlds from the telltale twinkles of chance cosmic alignments.
The latest results of that census appeared on Monday in Nature, and come from Poland’s Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment (OGLE), a 1.3-meter telescope in Chile. Based on a statistical analysis of more than 2,600 microlensing events, drawn from six years of observations on about 50 million stars, the OGLE team estimates that there is perhaps one Jupiter-mass rogue planet for every four stars in the galaxy. This result meshes well with leading planet-formation theories and more conventional observations of other planetary systems, and appears to refute the previous best guess from a competing team that estimated rogue Jupiters should be roughly twice as common as stars. (Neither result is anything for Earthlings to fret about—space is so huge that the chances of a rogue planet wandering close enough to our solar system to cause harm are, well, astronomically low.)
“Our new microlensing observations are in agreement with theoretical expectations on the frequency of free-floating Jupiters, and with infrared surveys for planetary-mass objects in star-forming regions,” says Przemek Mróz, lead author of the OGLE paper and an astronomer at the University of Warsaw Observatory in Poland. “We found that Jupiter-mass planets are at least 10 times less frequent than previously thought.”
Those earlier estimates of giant rogue planets being twice as common as stars sent shockwaves through the astronomical community when they emerged in a 2011 Nature paper from the Microlensing Observations in Astrophysics (MOA) survey, which uses a 1.8-meter telescope in New Zealand. “Very few of us in the microlensing field believed the original MOA results, simply because they were so difficult to reconcile with other observations and theory,” says Scott Gaudi, an astronomer at The Ohio State University. “But it was hard to know what was causing the apparent excess of events.”
CONTINUE READING: www.scientificamerican.com/article/wandering-in-the-void-billions-of-rogue-planets-without-a-home/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=sa-editorial-social&utm_content=image-post&utm_term=space_news_text_free&sf101938686=1