LAUSR.org creates dashboard-style pages of related content for over 1.5 million academic articles. Sign Up to like articles & get recommendations!

History of globulettes in the Milky Way

Photo from archive.org

Globulettes are small (radii Click to show full abstract

Globulettes are small (radii <10${<} 10$ kAU) dark dust clouds, seen against the background of bright nebulae. A majority of the objects have planetary mass. These objects may be a source of brown dwarfs and free floating planetary mass objects in the galaxy. In this paper we investigate how many globulettes could have formed in the Milky Way and how they could contribute to the total population of free floating planets. In order to do that we examine H-alpha images of 27 H II regions. In these images, we find 778 globulettes.We find that a conservative value of the number of globulettes formed is 5.7×1010$5.7\times 10^{10}$. If 10% of the globulettes form free floating planets then they have contributed with 5.7×109$5.7\times 10^{9}$ free floating planets in the Milky Way. A less conservative number of globulettes would mean that the globulettes could contribute 2.0×1010$2.0\times 10^{10}$ free floating planets. Thus the globulettes could represent a non-negligible source of free floating planets in the Milky Way.

Keywords: floating planets; free floating; globulettes could; history globulettes; milky way

Journal Title: Astrophysics and Space Science
Year Published: 2018

Link to full text (if available)


Share on Social Media:                               Sign Up to like & get
recommendations!

Related content

More Information              News              Social Media              Video              Recommended



                Click one of the above tabs to view related content.