2025-08-11
9 分钟Happy Monday, listeners. For Scientific American Science Quickly, I'm Rachel Feltman.
Let's kick off the week with our usual science news roundup.
Let's start with some space news.
Have you ever heard of rogue planets?
They sound pretty cool, and they are.
The term refers to exoplanets that roam free instead of orbiting a star.
Some of them may be objects that formed like stars,
coalescing in the wake of a giant gas cloud's collapse,
but never gaining enough mass to actually start the process of nuclear fusion.
Others may get their start in the usual planetary way, forming from the gas and dust around a star,
before getting ejected out into open space for some reason or another.
According to a preprint study made available last month,
the life of a rogue planet might not always be as lonely as it sounds.
Some of them may be able to form little planetary systems of their own, sans star.
The researchers behind the new study, which still has to go through peer review,
used instruments on the James Webb Space Telescope to gather information about eight different rogue planets,
each with a mass around five to ten times greater than Jupiter's.
Based on infrared observations, the scientists say,
six of the objects seem to have warm dust around them,
indicating the presence of the kinds of disks where planets form.