Philosophers never dreamed of such planets. The researchers found something strange

The solar system appears relatively simple in its structure. There are four terrestrial planets close to the sun that were formed from heavier elements that could not be blown away by the intense radiation from the young star. In the back are the gas giants made up of lighter elements that the Sun has managed to push away. With only one planetary system at your disposal, you can conclude that such a pattern should be repeated near all stars.

Also read: A mysterious exoplanet will turn into a “water world”. Is this place livable?

The problem is that the early stages of development of a young planetary system are not the happy casting of new planets, after which we have a ready-made system. It’s just the opposite. The condensates around the star are constantly interacting with the action of gravity. Small protoplanets collide a lot. Such collisions can lead to the complete destruction of the colliding planets, and sometimes to their merging into one larger body. These ever-changing things attract each other. The result is that planets that formed far from the star can suddenly find themselves in a tight orbit, with one orbit taking them several hours. This is how members of the hot Jupiter class are usually formed. Likewise, smaller planets that get too close to a massive gas giant can have their gravity accelerate enough to be completely ejected from the planetary system and become solitary planets drifting in interstellar space that go completely unnoticed because they do not reflect the light of any nearby star. Thus it is very difficult to detect them against the blackness of space.

In addition to hot Jupiters, scientists over the past three decades have also discovered small Neptunes, super-Earths, water worlds, molten rocky planets, and so on. However, all of these objects have one thing in common: they are made of baryonic matter.

Are there planets that are not made of baryonic matter?

in Latest scientific article Posting on preprint site arXiv, physicists from the University of Wisconsin-Madison suggest that everything may still be ahead. what is he talking about? Most of the currently known exoplanets have been discovered by the transit method. Simply put, astronomers watch a star to ensure that it does not dim regularly for a certain period of time. If this is the case, it is likely that a planet passes between us and the star, blocking part of the shield and preventing some of the radiation reaching us from it. If it were a planet, this dip in brightness would occur at regular intervals and always last the same amount of time.

However, the UWM researchers point out that as they search for more of these planets, scientists may encounter a similar, but slightly different decrease in brightness than what has been observed so far. In this case, it would be necessary to take into account the possibility that a planet passed between us and the star, but one made of … dark matter.

At first glance, this is a crazy theory, but …

According to currently accepted models, baryonic matter, from which all known objects are built, makes up only 15 percent. matter in the universe. The remaining 85 percent of the matter is dark matter. The only thing we know about dark matter so far is that it interacts gravitationally with baryonic matter, like holding galaxies together, and that it doesn’t interact with electromagnetic radiation, so it hasn’t been directly detected yet.

However, since dark matter interacts gravitationally and there is a lot of it, it is possible that there are things in the universe that are only made of pure matter. Scientists from the UWM suggest that such objects can reach masses comparable to that of planets. If such objects were present and close to Baryon’s star, they would behave like a dark exoplanet (i.e. an exoplanet made of dark matter).

This idea certainly stimulates the imagination, after all, it may turn out that there is another class of things in the universe, the existence of which we had no idea. The problem, however, is that since dark matter does not interact with electromagnetic radiation, we cannot yet search for such objects. By the way, so far the work of physicists from the University of Wisconsin-Madison has not been published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal and is only at the stage of careful review. I wonder if the work will actually be published in the near future. But imagination can work now.