At least 70 new rogue planets in Milky Way detected

Astronomer using European Southern Observatory telescopes have discovered at least 70 new rogue planets lurking in the Milky Way.

Astronomers have spotted what seems to be at least 70 planets drifting through space by themselves. These “rogue” planets are hard to see due to a lack of illumination from a parent star, but this is the largest number found at once.

Hervé Bouy and his colleagues at the University of Bordeaux, France analysed more than 80,000 observations of the Upper Scorpius stellar association, a star-forming region about 420 light years from Earth. Such regions are good hunting ground for rogue planets, as recently-formed worlds are still hot, meaning they give off more light and are easier to find.

Bouy and his team looked through the observations for rogue planet candidates with the right combination of apparent brightness, colour and motion over a number of decades.

“It’s a challenge because it’s really big data – we had to deal with billions of detections,” says Bouy. “This is the main difference with previous surveys doing the measurement of stars. They were doing it on a tiny scale compared to what we were doing.”

One difficulty is that the team had to estimate the mass of the planets from their brightness, making it impossible to differentiate between some of the bigger planets and smaller stars. Because of this, the researchers say they have found at least 70, but possibly as many as 170, probable rogue planets in a region spanning a wide part of the night sky. That makes it the largest group of rogue planets discovered at once, though the individual worlds are likely to be many light years apart.

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