kepler telescope glimpses population freefloating planets

KEPLER TELESCOPE GLIMPSES POPULATION FREEFLOATING PLANETS ARCHIVE

Hervé Bouy, an astronomer at the Laboratoire d'Astrophysique de Bordeaux, and project leader of the research, says that the discovery of so many free-floating planets would not have been feasible without access to NOIRLab's Astro Data Archive and Astro Data Lab Science Platform operated at the Community Science and Data Center (CSDC). This is the largest sample of such planets found in a single group and it nearly doubles the number known over the entire sky. Using observations and archival data from several of NSF's NOIRLab's observatories, together with observations from telescopes around the world and in orbit, astronomers have discovered at least 70 new free-floating planets - planets that wander through space without a parent star - in a nearby region of the Milky Way. To find these planets, the study's first author, Núria Miret-Roig of the Laboratoire d'Astrophysique de Bordeaux, at the University of Bordeaux in France, with a team of astronomers, used observations and archival data from a number of large observatories, including facilities from NSF's NOIRLab, telescopes of the European Southern Observatory, the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope, and the Subaru Telescope, amounting to 80,000 wide-field images over 20 years of observations. The first free-floating planets were discovered in the 1990s, but the latest findings have almost doubled the total number known.

At least 70, and as many as 170 of these Jupiter-sized planets have been found by examining data from over 20 years of observations. Researchers have discovered a group of free-floating planets-planets not orbiting a star-in a nearby region of the Milky Way known as the Upper Scorpius OB stellar association.

Kepler telescope glimpses population freefloating planets