Astronomers discovered two new planets formed in a harsh, stormy environment , according to a new study.
The planets, smaller than Neptune, were reported the journal Nature. The published findings may show that planetary systems are stronger than researchers believed them to be.
According to Los Angeles Times, star clusters were thought to be very hostile places for a planet to survive. William Welsh, an astronomer at San Diego State University not involved in the new study, wrote in a commentary only four planets the size of Jupiter or larger were able to survive harsh environments.
Researchers who published the findings used Kepler data from the open star cluster called NGC 6811; the cluster can be found thousands of light-years away in the constellation Cygnus. Scientists discovered two planets about three times the size of Earth.
"That's after sampling just 377 stars in clusters, which is pretty good odds in such an environment," Welsh said.
The LA Times reported stars grow in clusters when they begin to "condense out of giant clouds of gas and dust in space." During this process, the "gassy molecular haze that birthed them" surrounds the groups of young stars. The debris found around the cluster begins to form a disc and eventually forms a planet.
The two planets beating the odds in surviving is also astonishing because researchers estimated them to be billion years old. Researchers say the planets must have been massive enough early in its history for its gravity to keep it together, preventing the star cluster from destroying them.
"Old clusters represent a stellar environment much different than the birthplace of the Sun and other planet-hosting field stars," lead author Soren Meibom of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics said in a press release. "And we thought maybe planets couldn't easily form and survive in the stressful environments of dense clusters, in part because for a long time we couldn't find them."
The authors of the published findings said the cluster may have contained at least 6,000 stars, which would have been unfavorable for a younger planet to survive in.
"These planets are cosmic extremophiles," Meibom said in the release. "Finding them shows that small planets can form and survive for at least a billion years, even in a chaotic and hostile environment."
