From The Daily Galaxy
In a huge cloud of gas and dust 4600 light years from Earth in the the Rosette Nebula exists tiny, round, dark clouds. Dubbed "globulettes" these strange formations have the right characteristics to form free-floating planets with no parent star.
- The Rosette Nebula is home to more than a hundred of these tiny clouds. This observation from
- Gösta Gahm, astronomer at Stockholm University. These structures are very small, each with diameter less than 50 times the distance between the Sun and Neptune with an estimate that most of them are of planetary mass, less than 13 times Jupiter’s mass.
From the Article:
- Previous research has shown that there may be as many as 200 billion free-floating planets in our galaxy, the Milky Way. Until now scientists have believed that such “rogue planets”, which don’t orbit around a star, must have been ejected from existing planetary systems. New observations of tiny dark clouds in space point out another possibility: that some free-floating planets formed on their own.
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1 comment:
I've always been fascinated by rogue planets. Basically because I keep envisioning one that left it's system after a civilization had evolved on it. I know it's out there, but think how great it would be, (for me anyway) to find such a planet. Not so good for those that were living there, but a fascinating find that would be amazing if it ever happened. And theoretically, it could happen.
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