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Effie:
An international team of scientists has discovered an Earth-sized planet in the Milky Way galaxy, and it is not related in gravity to a specific star, according to a study published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.
So far, over 4,000 planets have been discovered outside of our solar system, the vast majority of them orbiting a specific star.
Although the theories of the emergence and development of planets predict the existence of free-moving bodies in space, it is only in recent years that some of them have begun to be identified, in light of the difficulties they face.
One of the most common ways to find exoplanets is to discover the contrast of light that occurs in a star when an orbiting object passes in front of its disk at a certain frequency.
It is also possible to infer the existence of planets from the changes in gravity resulting from their movements around the star.
Since neither of these strategies can detect planets moving alone in the galaxy, astronomers use a phenomenon known as the “microgravity lens” to find them.
It is considered to be a result of general relativity, which predicts that a massive object will bend the path of light coming from another body behind it.
The researchers describe in a press release that this phenomenon “acts like a huge magnifying glass” which makes it easier to observe distant objects.
“The chances of observing the microscopic lens are very low, because there are three things – the source, the lens and the observer – that should be perfectly aligned with each other,” said the lead author. and researcher at the California Institute of Technology, Przymek Mroz.
It is for this reason that programs to detect these types of astronomical phenomena track hundreds of millions of stars in the center of the Milky Way, in order to increase the chances of finding one.
In this case, astronomers used data from the Warsaw Telescope, a device with a 1.3 meter diameter lens located at the Las Campanas Observatory in Chile.
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