Bizarre, Earth-sized rogue planet found floating in Milky Way
- by Lorene Schwartz
- in People
- — Nov 3, 2020
One of the most curious questions to answer today was whether there is life on other planets. Using telescopes now in the Los Campanos Laboratory in Chile, astronomers look for changes in the brightness of the stars on clear nights to center the galaxy. OGLE is one of the largest and longest sky surveys, it started operations over 28 years ago.
The full findings of the study were published in Astrophysical Journal Letters. It is slightly smaller than Earth and is floating in the Milky Way.
Microlensing occurs when the presence of something massive can actually warp space-time, like black holes.
To do this, the team also looked at data from the European Space Agency's Gaia mission about how much energy the planet's star emits. Astronomers can observe the foreground objects that pass in front of distant stars in the background.
Przemek Mroz, the lead author of the study, said, "The probability of observing a microlens is very low, because the three objects: the source, the lens, and the observer need to be nearly perfectly aligned".
Modern surveys hunting for gravitational microlensing events are monitoring hundreds of millions of stars in the Milky Way centre, where the chances of microlensing are highest.
"Indeed, models of the event indicate that the lens must have been less massive than Earth, it was probably a Mars-mass object". The shorter the event, the smaller the object. While most of the programs viewed, by the stars, last for several days, the smaller planets provide only a few hours' window. Untethered to their very own solar, free-floating planets don't radiate mild the way in which orbital planets do, that means conventional analysis fashions couldn't show their existence.
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"When we first spotted this event, it was clear that it must have been caused by an extremely tiny object", said study co-author Radoslaw Poleski, researcher at the Astronomical Observatory of the University of Warsaw.
Planet birth itself is a violent, erratic process. Apart from this, scientists also took into consideration the "so-called Sun-like stars".
According to the article shared by NASA the other day, the Kepler space telescope has discovered around 300 million habitable planets in our galaxy so far. By studying the size distribution of rogue planets, scientists expect to gain a greater understanding of planetary formation and evolution. They are adrift in space after being ejected from their parent planet.
Lead author Steve Bryson, a researcher at NASA's Ames Research Center, said: "Kepler already told us there were billions of planets, but now we know a good chunk of those planets might be rocky and habitable".
It's possible our galaxy is filled to the brim with these rogue planets, but this one is particularly unusual for one special reason: it is the smallest found to date - even smaller than Earth - with a mass similar to Mars.
However, in the Milky Way it could be a number of rogue planets, and scientists have suggested that they could surpass the stars in our galaxy.
