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The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, NASA’s next observatory slated to launch in the mid-2020s, could reveal a host of rogue planets that do not orbit stars in our Milky Way galaxy, news reports research.
These exoplanets, or planets outside our solar system, move through the galaxy on their own and are not locked into orbits around the stars the way the Earth revolves around the sun. Understanding these rogue planets could shed more light on the formation, evolution and disruption of planetary systems.
These rogue planets are difficult to detect, and scientists have only found a few. But the capabilities of the Roman space telescope will allow it to find and characterize these nomadic traveling planets.
“As our view of the universe expanded, we realized our solar system could be unusual,” said Samson Johnson, study author and graduate student at Ohio State University, in a press release. “Roman will help us learn more about how we fit into the cosmic scheme of things by studying rogue planets. Imagine our little rocky planet floating freely in space – this is what this mission will help us find. . “
The telescope, named in honor of the agency’s first chief astronomer, is equipped with a powerful 2.4-meter mirror that will allow it to search for exoplanets. The telescope will look at large parts of the sky and monitor gravitational microlens events, where a planet and the star it orbits pass in front of a background star.
The microlens is when the presence of something massive can actually distort spacetime, like black holes, but it can also occur around planets.
For example, if a rogue planet is aligned with a distant star, the light from that star will essentially bend around the planet, resulting in a magnification effect. Researchers can use the changes in light around the planet to measure the mass of the planet.
“The microlens signal from a rogue planet only lasts between a few hours and a few days and then disappears forever,” said Matthew Penny, co-author of the study and assistant professor of physics and astronomy at the Louisiana State University of Baton Rouge, in a statement. “This makes them difficult to see from Earth, even with multiple telescopes. Roman is a game-changer for researching rogue planets.”
Since rogue planets do not emit light like stars, or even enough heat to be visible in infrared light, these otherwise invisible worlds will be visible through observations of microlens events by the Roman telescope.
Understanding rogue planets
The telescope’s field of view, which is a hundred times larger than Hubble’s infrared instrument, means the telescope can observe more of the sky in less time, the agency said. It will also allow high contrast imaging of individual exoplanets nearby.
The Roman Space Telescope will measure the light of a billion galaxies and seek to provide data that could answer key questions about how planetary arrangements are common to our own solar system, as well as the number of planets that can house life.
It also has the ability to find rogue planets as small as Mars, which is slightly larger than half the size of Earth.
So how do rogue planets form?
The birth of the planet itself is a violent and erratic process. The gas and dust in the disks around young stars gradually clump together and grow larger to form planets. But collisions between objects at larger scales, or even getting too close to another planet orbiting the star, or the star itself, can kick the planet out of its system.
And then the planet is alone – it has become a thug.
It is also possible that solitary planets could form on their own in isolated clouds of gas and dust.
The Roman Telescope will help researchers determine how these planets form by providing information on their number as well as their masses – which could help indicate their origin history.
Recent research using estimates from ground-based telescopes suggests the Roman telescope could find hundreds of rogue planets, help scientists understand how common they are in the Milky Way. Findings from the telescope could reveal that there are actually more rogue planets than stars in our galaxy, according to the study.
The Roman telescope will be 10 times more sensitive to detecting rogue planets than other telescopes and will search for them across 24,000 light years between our sun and the center of the galaxy.
“The universe could be teeming with rogue planets and we wouldn’t even know it,” Scott Gaudi, study co-author and professor of astronomy at Ohio State University, said in a statement. “We would never know without undertaking a thorough study of the space microlens as Roman will.”
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