Sentences with phrase «free floating planet»

It is very useful to select high magnification events, free floating planet candidates, anomalous events.

Not exact matches

However, in what is probably the oldest book of the Bible, Job, living in an ancient culture that knew nothing about space or planets, asserted that God hung the earth on nothing (1500 B.C.) or, in other words, the earth free floats in space.

The object may be the lowest - mass free - floating planet found to date in the solar neighborhood.

An oversized free - floating planet formed by agglomeration would not have a disk, explains Lada, so these dwarfs must have formed like stars.

A new census of free - floating Jupiter - mass planets determined that these worlds are a tenth as common as previous estimates suggested.

The multitude of fainter water - rich, free - floating brown dwarfs and planets within the Orion nebula are all new discoveries.

New results suggest free - floating giant planets are less common than previously believed, but hint at vast numbers of smaller castaway worlds

If the orientation had been different, we would have seen only the planet, and we probably would have called it a free - floating planet,» he added.

By measuring those rising and falling «light curves,» Kepler will give astronomers valuable information about planets orbiting other stars — including exoplanets in far - out orbits that other techniques can't detect — and even free - floating planets that don't orbit stars at all.

Last year, astronomers reported that extrasolar planets may outnumber stars in our galaxy by almost a two - to - one margin, and that three - quarters of these worlds are likely to be free - floaters, not bound to any star.

LIQUID water may survive on free - floating planets that have no star to warm them.

He does worry that on other planets that don't receive light energy from a sun but still get bombarded with GCRs — such as free floating rogue planets not tied to any solar system — temperatures would dip too low and freeze life in its tracks.

To explain the MOA results, some theorists guessed that many of the purported rogue giant planets were actually free - floating failed stars called brown dwarfs — intermediate objects that straddle the hazy line between being a planet and a sun.

Similarly - aged stars moving through space together in a group — described by astronomers as an association — are of great interest to researchers, because they are considered a prime target to hunt for brown dwarfs and free - floating planet - like objects.

The pair calculated that one out of every thousand free - floating planet - sized bodies should be formed in this way, although they would be difficult to detect.

You suggest that the Milky Way — and by analogy the universe — may abound with free - floating planet - sized bodies (14...

If their stellar kin are similar — not brown dwarfs at all but sneaky double bodies — there may be more free - floating planets in our universe than we thought.

Astronomers might even spot free - floating planets through gravitational lensing, in which the planet's gravity magnifies light from a background star.

It also began to consider adding a «starshade», a free - floating umbrella - like spacecraft that would fly alongside WFIRST and block enough light for the telescope to spy Earth - sized planets.

The huge number of free - floating planets at our current observational limit is giving me hope that we will discover a wealth of smaller Earth - sized planets with the E-ELT,» lead scientist Holger Drass from Germany's Astronomisches Institut said in the statement.

Altogether, PSO J318 - 22 is the first free - floating object with the colors, magnitudes, spectrum, luminosity, and mass that overlap the young dusty planets around HR 8799 and 2MASS J1207 - 39.

The Extremely Red, Young L Dwarf PSO J318 - 22: A Free - Floating Planetary - Mass Analog to Directly Imaged Young Gas - Giant Planets

By combining our atmospheric characterisation with the age and metallicity constraints arising from the probable membership to the AB Doradus moving group, we find that CFBDSIRJ214947.2 - 040308.9 is probably a 4 - 7 Jupiter masses free - floating planet with an effective temperature of ~ 700K and a log g of ~ 4.0, typical of the late T - type exoplanets that are targeted by direct imaging.

An independent Bayesian analysis from proper motion measurements results in a 87 % probability that this free - floating planet is a member of the 50 - 120 Myr old AB Doradus moving group, which strengthens the spectroscopic youth diagnosis.

However, many others argue that only planemos that directly orbit stars should qualify as planets, preferring to use the terms «planetary body,» «planetary mass object» or «planemo» for similar free - floating objects (as well as planet - size moons).

An artist's concept of the free - floating planet PSO J318.5 - 22.

This technique is most sensitive to massive planets orbiting hundreds of millions of kilometres from their star and has also been used to discover a population of free - floating giant planets that do not orbit any star.

Additionally, microlensing is the only method capable of detecting free - floating planets that no longer have a host star.