Astronomers discover largest group of starless planets ever discovered – IT Pro – News

A group of astronomers from the European Southern Observatory has discovered a new group of at least seventy starless planets using data provided by ground-based and space-based telescopes. It is the largest group of starless planets ever discovered.

The starless planets are said to have a mass similar to Jupiter and are said to lie in a region where many stars are formed in the association of Scorpio and Centaurus. starless planets According to the European Southern Observatory They are difficult to detect because they are not near a star. It will shine beams of light on it, making it visible to optical telescopes. However, because these planets still “glow” after their formation, they were noticeable, according to the observatory.

This does not mean that discovery It came naturally. After all, the team behind the discovery collected data from various telescopes in Chile, including data from very large telescope and the Visible and infrared scanning telescoop It is located in the Cerro Paranal site in the Atacama Desert. Data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia satellite was also used.

The data used spanned nearly twenty years. “We analyzed the small motions, colors and differences in brightness for tens of millions of sources from a large portion of the starry sky,” said astronomer Nuria Merritt Roig. This resulted in tens of thousands of images that had to be examined. According to the researchers, these results indicate that many of these starless planets could orbit the Milky Way.