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This is one of the first pictures from the Hubble Space Telescope since its repair in December 1999, taken January 10-11, 2000. Note the comet-like objects surrounding the dying star of the Eskimo planetary nebula. These are likely to be ancient "primordial fog particles" (PFPs) of hydrogen and helium, long since frozen as "Neptunes", which must be very common in the Galaxy disk due to disruption of protoglobularstarclusters of PFPs orbiting through this dense layer. On average each star in the Galaxy has about 30 million such "rogue planets" lurking in the dark, separated by about 10^14 meters (1000 times the distance to the sun from the earth). The mass of these objects is a fossil of the weak turbulence existing in the primordial universe at the time of their formation.
astro-ph/9904317
,
astro-ph/9904283
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