Quote:
|
Originally Posted by COREY S. POWELL, 16 July 2024, IEEE
On 29 October 2020, astronomer Przemek Mróz from the University of Warsaw and an international group of collaborators reported a peculiar flicker of light originating from halfway across our galaxy. The signal, designated OGLE-2016-BLG-1928, was extremely subtle. It caused a single star to brighten and dim by about 20 percent over a 6-hour period, just once, never repeated. But the implication of that little flicker was huge: It was the first credible sighting of an Earth-size “rogue planet,” a world untethered to any star, floating freely between the stars.
“It’s always exciting when you find a truly new thing. This is why I became a scientist,” Mróz says. And, oh boy, did he get what he wanted.
Over the previous decade, three independent sky-monitoring projects had found evidence of massive, Jupiter-like planets drifting alone through space. OGLE-2016-BLG-1928 was the first hint that Earth-size free-floating planets are out there, too. Last year, a group working on the MOA ( Microlensing Observations in Astrophysics) survey found MOA-9y-5919, a second likely rogue Earth. Put these discoveries together, and you get not just a few oddities, but an entire, previously unknown class of celestial objects. Soon we will know a lot more: Two upcoming space telescopes scheduled for launch by the United States and China will track down these wanderers and unlock vital information about them, using fast infrared cameras.
“The conclusion is now strong. We have a huge population of low-mass, free-floating planets in the Milky Way,” Mróz says. “They seem to be really common. Current estimates are that there may be seven such planets per every star.” That translates to potentially trillions of rogue planets in our galaxy alone. We just didn’t know about them until now.
|
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers provides some insight into NASA’s US $3.9 billion Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope.
Story here :-
https://spectrum.ieee.org/rogue-planet
Rogue planets and the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope
