Rogue planets are cosmic bodies that lack stellar orbits and record masses comparable to the planets in our solar system. A team of astronomers from France harnessed data from numerous European Southern Observatory (ESO) telescopes and other observatory facilities to unveil 70 new rogue planets, the single largest assembly of new detections.
“We did not know how many to expect and are excited to have found so many,” says Núria Miret-Roig, the first author of the study published today in Nature Astronomyan. Miret-Roig is an astronomer at the Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Bordeaux, France and the University of Vienna, Austria.
This remarkable discovery identifies at least 70 rogue planets within the Upper Scorpius and Ophiuchus constellations. This effort has required extensive data, spanning approximately two decades, aided by both ground-based and space telescopes. The team used observations from a range of telescopes including ESO’s Very Large Telescope, the Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy, the VLT Survey Telescope and the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope located in Chile.
“We used tens of thousands of wide-field images from ESO facilities, corresponding to hundreds of hours of observations, and literally tens of terabytes of data.”, explains Hervé Bouy, an astronomer at the Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Bordeaux, France, and project leader of the new research. The team's approach included measuring the motions, colours, and luminosities of over a million light sources. These measurements allowed them to identify the faintest objects in the region, the rogue planets. Data from the European Space Agency's Gaia satellite also contributed to this accomplishment.
Source: ESO. "ESO telescopes help uncover largest group of rogue planets yet". https://www.eso.org/public/news/eso2120/. 22/12/2021. [Date accessed 26 Dec, 2021].
Edited by: Yash Pincha
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