Posted on 05/19/2011 12:23:55 PM PDT by NYer
An international team of astronomers claim to have found free-floating "planets" which do not seem to orbit a star.
Writing in Nature, they say they have found 10 Jupiter-sized objects which they could not connect to any solar system. They also believe such objects could be as common as stars are throughout the Milky Way.
The objects revealed themselves by bending the light of more distant stars, an effect called "gravitational microlensing".
Objects of large enough mass can bend light, as Albert Einstein predicted. If a large object passes in front of a more distant background star, it may act as a lens, bending and distorting the light of that star so that it may appear to brighten significantly.
The researchers examined data collected from microlensing surveys of what is called the Galactic Bulge, the central area of our own Milky Way.
Using the data, they found evidence of 10 Jupiter-sized objects with no parent star detected within 10 Astronomical Units (AU). One AU is equivalent to the distance between our Earth and Sun.
Further analysis led them to the conclusion that most of these objects did not have parent stars. 'Common' objects
Based on the number of such bodies in the area surveyed, the astronomers then extrapolated that such objects could be extremely common.
They calculated that they could be almost twice as common as "main-sequence stars" - such as our own Sun - which are still burning through their hydrogen fuel stock.
Co-author Takahiro Sumi, an associate professor at Osaka University in Japan, said these free-floating planets were "very common, as common as a regular star".
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.co.uk ...
orphans... so sad. /s
Now we know where libs came from.
Dyson Spheres
Pocket Universe
Ring World
I am trying to fgure out how to create a bubble universe, if I ever succeed who wants in?? /s
MACHOs.
No surprises there. Just waiting on the visuals.
Give you a chill?
Or they could be very large dead remnants of stars that never had any children/planets of their own - dying childless. So sad /s
lol
Objects below the mass threshold to be considered even “brown dwarfs”. These should however still theoretically show up on infrared due to heat generated by gravitational contraction, much like Jupiter.
Women, children, minorities, and free-floating planets hit hardest.
Getting smacked with one of these things would mean good bye earth.
Their composition would also be different from that of any dwarf star — ?? Aren’t dwarfs made out of squishium or some such thing where the press of gravity is enough to collapse any atom?
That’s what the outer gas giants are for...
or did you just think they were there by accident?
These free floating planets could come in from any angle — not a lot of chance that Saturn or Jupiter will be in just the right place to catch an earth bound one.
You’re thinking of a white dwarf. A brown dwarf is larger than a gas giant, but does not have enough mass to initiate ignition. There are some brown dwarfs that are burning deuterium or lithium, however that does not last long. There need to be at least 0.08 solar masses in order to start hydrogen fusion via gravitational confinement - a lot of pressure is needed to overcome electrostatic repulsive forces. And red dwarfs tend to last extremely long, since they have relatively low energy outputs (watt/meters^2). The hotter the star, the higher the power output per square meter, it’s a T^4 function according to the Stefan Boltzmann Law.
A white dwarf is after all the fuel is expended, including helium. If a star is over 0.8 solar amsses it will go into helium burning in the end stages - and go red giant. If the remnant is over 1.4 solar masses (Chandrasekhar Limit), it will go past white dwarf, past neutron star, to a singularity (a.k.a. black hole), where it will eventually evaporate due to Hawking radiation.
No chilluns?
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