Caption: An artist’s conception of a free-floating planet analog courtesy of NASA/JPL.
There may be a large number of undetected bright, substellar objects similar to giant exoplanets in our own solar neighborhood, according to new work from a team led by Carnegie’s Jonathan Gagné and including researchers from the Institute for Research on Exoplanets (iREx) at Université de Montréal. Similarly-aged stars moving through space together in a group, ie an association – are of great interest to researchers, as they are considered a prime target to hunt for brown dwarfs and free-floating planet-like objects.
Recent studies of an association of stars called TW Hya have revealed some of the first known isolated giant planet-sized objects in the neighborhood of our own Sun, ~100 light years a...
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