[ad_1]
Astronomers have spotted stranger “floating” planets that could roam deep space without being tethered to any stars.
While we might think the planets must orbit some sort of star, astronomers have detected such orphan “thugs” before. And new study uses data collected by NASA’s planet hunt Kepler Space Telescope to identify other possible exoplanets move freely by themselves.
“Kepler has achieved what it was never designed to do, providing new, provisional evidence for the existence of a population of land mass floating planets,” co-author Eamonn Kerins, researcher at the University of Manchester in the UK. , said in a press release.
Related: Kepler’s 7 Greatest Exoplanet Discoveries
In the study, which was published on July 6 in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, the team used data Kepler collected during a two-month stay in 2016 during the K2 mission phase of the Space Telescope .
During this two-month period, Kepler observed a field of millions of stars near the center of our galaxy every 30 minutes. By analyzing this data, the team hoped to see signs of rare gravitational microlens events, which occur when the gravity of a massive foreground object bends light from a more distant star or quasar, acting as a cosmic magnifying glass that allows scientists to see objects that might otherwise be too far away to be spotted.
During the study, they found 27 candidate signals of short duration of varying duration, ranging from one hour to 10 days.
Some of these signals had already been observed in other data captured from the ground on Earth. However, data from the four shortest microlens events is consistent with the presence of planets having roughly the same mass as Earth.
If the microlens events spotted with Kepler revealed a host star or a star that has planets in its orbit, scientists might expect a longer signal. So, finding evidence of these planets but without the longer signal typically associated with a host star, the team suspects that the planets could float freely.
It is possible that if they are in fact rogue and starless planets, they originally formed around a host star and were driven by a gravitational force by a more massive planet or object, according to the press release.
But spotting these signals was not an easy task, especially since Kepler was not designed to detect planets using microlenses, nor was it designed to study a field of. stars also crowded. (Kepler, who was decommissioned in november 2018 after nearly a decade of working in space, searching for planets using the “transit method,” looking for stellar dips in brightness caused when a planet crossed the face of its host star.)
“These signals are extremely difficult to find,” senior author Ian McDonald, a researcher at the University of Manchester, said in the same statement. “Our observations pointed an elderly and sick telescope with blurry vision at one of the most densely populated parts of the sky, where there are already thousands of bright stars of varying brightness, and thousands of asteroids that roam our field. “
“From this cacophony, we’re trying to extract tiny characteristic illuminations caused by the planets, and we only have one chance to see a signal before it goes away. It’s about as simple as look for the single blink of a firefly in the middle of a freeway, using only a cell phone, ”McDonald said.
To do this, the team had to develop new techniques to analyze their data. However, while their results are impressive and exciting, they alone do not confirm the existence of these rogue planets. Future observations with missions like NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope and maybe also the European Space Agency Euclid The mission, which will both be able to detect signals from microlens events, could be used to help confirm the existence of these strange planets, the statement said.
Email Chelsea Gohd at [email protected] or follow her on Twitter @chelsea_gohd. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.
[ad_2]
Source link