British scientists have discovered how wandering planets are formed

 British scientists from Queen Mary University of London have made a breakthrough discovery about the origin of mysterious "rogue planets" - planetary-mass objects that float freely in space, unattached to any stars. The results of their research were published on arXiv, a platform presenting the latest news in the field of science.

Rogue planets, also called rogue planets, are still little-known astronomical objects. Due to the difficulty of detecting them, scientists do not have a complete picture of their origins. Until now, it was believed that they could be formed in a standard way in protoplanetary disks around young stars or in clouds of gas and dust. However, new research sheds new light on this problem.

A team of researchers from Queen Mary University of London conducted a series of advanced computer simulations to understand what might cause planets to leave their orbits and embark on a lonely journey through space. The key discovery was that the main source of these mysterious objects are binary or circumbinary systems, in which planets orbit a pair of stars.

Simulations have shown that in this type of star systems, from two to seven planets with masses comparable to the mass of Earth are ejected into space. However, if we are talking about giant planets, much more massive, the frequency of such ejection drops to about 0.6.

Scientists took into account a number of parameters in their simulations, such as the initial mass of the protoplanetary disk, the influence of the external environment and the level of turbulence in the disk. Each simulation covered a period of 10 million years, which allowed us to observe the full process of formation of the planetary system.

Taking into account binary star systems turned out to be crucial. They appear to be the main source of planetary ejection into space, which explains why these mysterious objects are relatively numerous in our galaxy. This discovery has important implications for our understanding of the evolution of planetary systems. Rogue planets were previously thought to be relatively rare, but new research suggests they may be much more common than previously thought.

The discovery of British scientists will certainly contribute to deepening our knowledge of the dynamics of the formation and evolution of planetary systems. Understanding the mechanisms leading to the formation of rogue planets may also be important for the search for extraterrestrial life forms that could develop on such objects.