Newly Discovered Earth-Like Rogue Planet Might be Smallest Free Floating World
Runaway1956 writes:
Newly discovered Earth-like rogue planet might be smallest free floating world:
Earth is part of a solar system where several planets revolve around a star. It is the pull of the Sun that is keeping the worlds in their set orbits in a uniform manner. While such solar systems are in abundance in the Milky Way galaxy, there exist millions of rogue planets in the galaxy who do not have a central star to revolve around and instead they just go about their own way in deep space.
Of the many rogue planets found till now, most are massive in size, often ranging from two to 40 times the mass of Jupiter (it is important to remember here that Jupiter is equivalent to about 300 Earths). So with the discovery of the recent free world, scientists are looking at the possibility of the wide existence of small rogue planets.
[...] Experts use light coming from a star to detect the various exoplanets. So it is very difficult to spot a world without a star. Moreover, for a planet which is in between Earth and Mars in terms of mass, detecting it is way harder. To hunt the world, scientists used "gravitational microlensing," which involves watching foreground objects pass in front of distant background stars. As part of the project, the team was using a 1.3-meter telescope at Las Campanas Observatory in Chile to monitor millions of stars near the Milky Way's centre on every clear night.
The new study was published online on 29 October in Astrophysical Journal Letters.
Journal Reference:
P. Mroz, R. Poleski, A. Gould, et al. A terrestrial-mass rogue planet candidate detected in the shortest-timescale microlensing event, (DOI: https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.12377)
Also at spaceref.com
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