Moanis Hawas wrote Saturday, July 22, 2023 10:00 PM Joint research by scientists from NASA and Japan’s Osaka University indicates that the US space agency’s Nancy Grace Roman Telescope, scheduled for launch by May 2027, could find 400 A planet similar in mass to Earth.
According to the Indian TOI website, rogue planets, unlike ordinary planets, are not attached to any star and drift through space. In simpler terms, rogue planets are free-floating planets that are not bound by the star’s gravitational force. Earth is attached to the sun. It is also said that the number of planets outnumbers the number of planets orbiting stars.
“We estimate that our galaxy is home to 20 times more rogue planets than stars — trillions of worlds wandering around on their own,” said David Bennett, senior investigator at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and co-author of two papers describing the findings.
“This is the first measurement of the number of rogue planets in a galaxy sensitive to planets less massive than Earth,” Bennett said.
How did scientists find out about rogue stars?
The team conducted a nine-year survey, called Microlensing Observations in Astrophysics (MOA), at the Mount John University Observatory in New Zealand. Microlensing events occur when an object such as a star or planet is in near perfect alignment with an unrelated background star from where it is seen.
Because anything with mass warps the fabric of space-time, light from the distant star bends around the object as it passes near it, causing a brief spike in the brightness of the background star’s light. This gave astronomers clues about the intervening object. “Microlensing is the only way we can find objects such as free-floating low-mass planets and even primordial black holes,” said Takahiro Sumi, a professor at Osaka University and lead author of the paper with a new appreciation for rogue planets in our galaxy.
“It’s very exciting to use gravity to discover things that we could never hope to see directly,” Sumi added, and the team has already identified an evil Earth-like planet. The paper describing the discovery will appear in a future issue of The Astronomical Journal.
