Er zwerven mogelijk miljarden eenzame planeten rond in het heelal

Foto: Sargasso achtergrond wereldbol

Reacties (3)

#1 knelistonie

Jawel, maar een factor 2-10 verschillend ten opzichte van de vorige raming is echt wel binnen de marges van Standard Theory.

Als je het hebt over echte wetenschap that is :P

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#2 Karl Kraut

Er zal wel gauw een snuggere entrepreneur een social community voor die eenzame planeten oprichten. En dan cashen.

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#3 Anoniem

So the astronomers with MOA sat down and stared at a patch of sky near the center of the Milky Way. In fact, they looked at an astonishing 50 million stars near the galactic bulge — stars are densely packed there, maximizing the chance of seeing a rare event. [..] And of these, only 10 — ten — had that magic characteristic time of about 2 days, indicating the lens was a planet with about the mass of Jupiter. Stars are more massive, and the lensing effect can take weeks from start to finish; only a planet can make such a short event.
Being careful, the astronomers took those 10 events and asked the folks using a different survey (OGLE, for Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment; acronyms using “GL” tend to be somewhat droll) to see if they saw them as well. OGLE caught 7 of the 10 seen by MOA, confirming their results.

Now, it’s possible that if a planet were on really wide orbit, the parent star would be too far away to have a significant lensing effect. However astronomers can determine statistically how often that should happen, and the likelihood is only about 25%, meaning a significant number of the events must have been caused by planets without stars.
Hoe kan 10 resultaten op 50 miljoen onderzochte sterren leiden tot een statistisch significante conclusie dat het niet die 25% ver-van-de-ster-af-staande-planeten zijn?

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