Free Astronomy Magazine May-June 2022
47 MAY-JUNE 2022 ASTRO PUBLISHING Rogue planets, lurking far away from any star illuminating them, would normally be impossible to image. However, Miret-Roig and her team took advantage of the fact that, in the few million years after their formation, these planets are still hot enough to glow, making them directly detectable by sensitive cameras on large telescopes. They found at least 70 new rogue plan- ets with masses comparable to Jupiter’s in a star-forming region close to our Sun, located within the Scorpius and Ophiuchus constellations. To spot so many rogue plan- ets, the team used data span- ning about 20 years from a number of telescopes on the ground and in space. “We measured the tiny motions, the colours and luminosi- ties of tens of millions of sources in a large area of the sky,” explains Miret- Roig. “These measurements allowed us to securely iden- tify the faintest objects in this region, the rogue planets.” The team used observations from ESO’s Very Large Tele- scope (VLT), the Visible and In- frared Survey Telescope for As- tronomy (VISTA), the VLT Survey Telescope (VST) and the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope located in Chile, along with other facilities. “The vast majority of our data come from ESO observatories, which were abso- lutely critical for this study. Their wide field of view and unique sensi- tivity were keys to our success,” ex- plains Hervé Bouy, an astronomer at the Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Bordeaux, France, and project leader of the new research. “We used tens of thousands of wide-field images from ESO facilities, corre- sponding to hundreds of hours of observations, and literally tens of terabytes of data.” T his artist’s impression shows an example of a rogue planet with the Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex visible in the background. Rogue planets have masses comparable to those of the planets in our Solar System but do not orbit a star, instead roaming freely on their own. [ESO/M. Kornmesser/S. Guisard]
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