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Astronomy

Bound and unbound planets abound

Two teams searching for extrasolar planets have jointly discovered a new population of objects: ten Jupiter-mass planets far from their host stars, or perhaps even floating freely through the Milky Way. See Letter p.349

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Correspondence to Joachim Wambsganss.

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Wambsganss, J. Bound and unbound planets abound. Nature 473, 289–291 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1038/473289a

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  1. Hot Jupiters in stable resonance?

    Would it seem reasonable that so-called ?hot jupiters? are in resonance i.e. have a stable orbit? If one utilized our stellar system as a simulation, with the addition of a hot jupiter, then what would the resonance be? Would it be calculated as non integral? Then if our cold gas giant were discarded, would this then seem to change the resonance; hence the possibility of a stable orbit? Thus might the data set of hot jupiters of approximately 70-100, all have systems with no cold gas giants? Would this then also be consistent with a 3-body scenario, with ejection (or effectively, since thrown into wide orbit?) of a cold gas giant and inward migration of what becomes a hot jupiter in stable orbit? Hence would one have the prediction of no cold gas giants for any of the hot jupiter systems?

  2. A huge population of unbound planetary-mass objects was predicted in the Astrophysical Journal in 1987 [vol. 322(1), pages 34-36]. Pulsar-planets were also later predicted in a published paper.

    A discussion of this form of dark matter, and its detection via microlensing was published in:

    http://arxiv.org/ftp/astro-...
    [Fractals 10(1), pages 27-38, 2002]

    It is a great pleasure to see this population finally being revealed to us. The stellar-mass MACHOs and the planetary-mass unbound objects discovered via microlensing may comprise the galactic dark matter, and the specific two-peak mass spectrum was predicted definitively almost 25 years ago. It has been a long wait, but better late than never.

    Robert L. Oldershaw
    http://www3.amherst.edu/~rl...
    Discrete Scale Relativity; Fractal Cosmology

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