“Microlensing is the only way we can find objects like low-mass free-floating planets and even primordial black holes,” said Takahiro Sumi, lead author of one of the studies and a professor at Osaka University, in a statement. Researchers can use the changes in light around the planet to measure the planet’s mass. But anything with mass can cause this light-warping lensing effect, revealing other celestial objects.įor instance, if a rogue planet is in alignment with a distant star, the light from that star will essentially bend around the planet, resulting in a magnifying effect. The foreground star acts as a lens, magnifying and brightening the background star for a matter of hours. As stars in our galaxy move, they can align with more distant stars. Microlensing is a technique astronomers use to study distant stars and search for exoplanets. “This is the first measurement of the number of rogue planets in the galaxy that is sensitive to planets less massive than Earth.” “We estimate that our galaxy is home to 20 times more rogue planets than stars - trillions of worlds wandering alone,” said David Bennett, coauthor of both studies and a senior research scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, in a statement. The findings were made during a nine-year survey called Microlensing Observations in Astrophysics, carried out at New Zealand’s Mount John University Observatory. Two new studies, both set to publish in a future edition of The Astronomical Journal, point to the discovery of only the second known Earth-mass rogue planet and present evidence suggesting that rogue planets are six times more abundant than star-orbiting planets in our galaxy. This artist's illustration shows an ice-encrusted, Earth-mass rogue planet drifting through space by itself.
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