The year 2021 has been pretty impressive, at least when it comes to astronomy, but it still doesn’t want to go away without delighting our curious minds even more. The idea of the so-called rogue planets was seen as pretty improbably at first, and there’s no wonder why. How could a planet exist far away from stars? Science tells us that every planet is formed within a solar system.
But at least one of several cosmic events can make a planet depart forever from the protection, energy, and light of its host star. Finding such planets is obviously a major challenge for astronomers since they are completely dark, lacking any light from stars. Finding planets that revolve around stars is hard enough, though. But Space.com reveals for us that astronomers recently discovered dozens of new planets that don’t have their solar systems around anymore.
70 rogue exoplanets were found
The newfound 70 exoplanets that have gone rogue is indeed record-breaking. They were found in an area located roughly 420 light-years away from Earth.
Núria Miret-Roig, the lead author of the study, declared:
We did not know how many to expect and are excited to have found so many.
Astronomers had been analyzing data collected by various telescopes to come to the new outstanding findings.
The study’s lead author also explained the following, as cited by Space.com:
We measured the tiny motions, the colors and luminosities of tens of millions of sources in a large area of the sky,
These measurements allowed us to securely identify the faintest objects in this region, the rogue planets.
Luckily enough, the number of discovered exoplanets, meaning planets beyond the boundaries of our own Solar System, has also increased along with the newfound rogue planets. All of these findings prove to us once again that the Universe is far larger than anybody could ever imagine.
