Cosmic orphans, or those planets without a star, are common. A new study claimed that planets that have gone rogue outnumbered their counterparts in Milky Way.
Milky Way Is A Home to Cosmic Orphans
According to recent forecasts, a future NASA satellite telescope, Nancy Grace Roman Telescope, may be able to find over 400 Earth-mass worlds that have "gone rogue" and are now wandering our galaxy alone. These worlds are buried throughout the Milky Way.
The Roman Space Telescope is a NASA observatory built to research a wide range of infrared astrophysics issues, find and picture exoplanets, and learn more about dark energy and dark matter. Its expansive field of view will be 100 times greater than that of the Hubble Space Telescope.
Microlensing, the universe's magnifying glass, will be used to detect thousands of exoplanets. It will also utilize the coronagraphy technique to obscure the dazzling glare of exoplanet host stars so that planets and planet-forming disks may be seen clearly.
The orphan worlds are believed to have originated in planetary systems similar to the solar system before being expelled at some time by an unknown mechanism. Despite the stereotype of planets neatly orbiting a star, recent findings indicate that the number of such orphaned starless worlds in the Milky Way may be 20 to 1, suggesting that untethered worlds are roughly six times more prevalent than planets circling parent stars in our galaxy, Space.com reported.
According to David Bennett, a senior research scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and a co-author of two papers presenting the findings, they estimate that our galaxy is home to trillions of rogue planets traveling alone. This means that our galaxy has 20 times more rogue planets than stars. The number of rogue planets in the cosmos has never been quantified in a way sensitive to planets with masses lower than Earth.
Microlensing to Discover Free-Floating Planets
The team's discoveries result from a nine-year investigation, MOA (Microlensing Observations in Astrophysics), carried out at the Mount John University Observatory in New Zealand. From our perspective, this is known as a microlensing event when a star, planet, or other object is in nearly perfect alignment with an unrelated background star.
Light from the distant star bends around the closer object as it passes by because anything with mass warps space-time. A temporary increase in the brightness of the light from the background star caused by the nearer object functions as a natural lens, providing astronomers with information about the intervening object that they cannot obtain in any other way.
Through microlensing, we can only discover objects like low-mass free-floating planets and even primordial black holes.
According to Takahiro Sumi, an Osaka University professor, and the paper's primary author, microlensing is the only method for locating things like low-mass free-floating planets and even primordial black holes. Utilizing gravity to find things we could never hope to see directly is quite fascinating.
The team's discovery of the approximately Earth-mass renegade planet is only the second.
The article outlining the discovery will be published in a subsequent issue of The Astronomical Journal. The same journal will also publish a second research that gives a demographic analysis that shows rogue planets are six times more prevalent than worlds that orbit stars in our galaxy.
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