Astronomers discover largest group of starless planets ever

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

The starless planets are said to have a similar mass to Jupiter and are said to be in a region where many stars form in the Scorpio-Centaurus association. Starless planets are difficult to detect because they are not near a star, according to the European Southern Observatory. It would shine rays of light on them, making them visible to optical telescopes. However, because these planets still ‘afterglow’ after their formation, they were noticeable, according to the observatory.

That’s not to say the discovery came naturally. The team behind the find combined data from several telescopes in Chile, including data from the Very Large Telescope and the Visible and Infrared Survey telescope at the Cerro Paranal site in the Atacama Desert. Data from ESA’s Gaia satellite was also used.

The data used spanned a period of about twenty years. “We analyzed small movements, colors and brightness differences of tens of millions of sources from a large part of the starry sky,” said astronomer Núria Miret-Roig. This resulted in tens of thousands of images that had to be examined. According to the researchers, these results indicate that many more of these starless planets could be orbiting in the Milky Way galaxy.