geotimesheader  
Home Calendar Classifieds Subscribe Advertise

Geotimes
 Published by the American Geological Institute
Newsmagazine of the Earth Sciences

October 2000



News Notes
WEB EXTRA: PLANETARY SCIENCE

Who needs a sun when you're young and free?
 
Eighteen celestial objects were caught loitering recently in a young stellar cluster near Orion's belt, rather than orbiting stars as most planets do, reports a team of astronomers in the Oct. 6 Science. The astronomical community is divided over what to do with these misfit youths.

Based on our own solar system, a massive body is defined as a planet if it has no nuclear reaction in its interior and orbits a star, says Maria Rosa Zapatero Osorio, who led the team at the Astrophysics Institute of the Canary Islands. But that definition leaves the new-found free-floaters, which have planet-like interiors, in semantic limbo. They hover in the star cluster without orbiting anything.

While some astronomers would like to initiate a change in policy to allow planets the freedom to drift when young, "most astronomers still insist that planets have to be in orbit about stars," says Jibor Basri of the University of California at Berkeley.

At five to 15 times the mass of Jupiter, these new kind of isolated giant planets, as the Canary Island team calls them, breach the size of brown dwarfs. A brown dwarf burns deuterium in its core and not hydrogen, as other stars do. It must be at least 13 times the mass of Jupiter before it can burn deuterium, but not reach 75 times Jupiter's mass, the point at which hydrogen fusion begins.

At three orders of magnitude younger than our sun, these strange objects are challenging the theory of how planetary bodies form. One theory might have the objects forming after the breakup of a large molecular cloud as the smaller fragments collapse under their own gravity, similar to the way brown dwarfs form, Zapatero Osorio says.


Location of the Orionis star cluster (region around the brightest star in the bottom right side of the figure) and finding charts (45"  by 45") for three spectroscopically confirmed, very young cluster  membranes with masses between 5 to 15 times the mass of  Jupiter. Photo image courtesy of Science.

"No matter what terminology astronomers eventually settle on, it's already clear that the study of free floating, low-mass objects — stars, brown dwarfs, and now planetary mass objects — can lend significant insight to our understanding of how stars and planets form," says Joan Najita of the National Optical Astronomical Observatories. "I think that will be the 'legacy', so to speak, of the reported observations."

Christina Reed
 

Geotimes Home | AGI Home | Information Services | Geoscience Education | Public Policy | Programs | Publications | Careers

© 2024 American Geological Institute. All rights reserved. Any copying, redistribution or retransmission of any of the contents of this service without the express written consent of the American Geological Institute is expressly prohibited. For all electronic copyright requests, visit: http://www.copyright.com/ccc/do/showConfigurator?WT.mc_id=PubLink