Astronomers have discovered many strange "drifting planets" that roam in the depths of space without attaching to any stars.
We once thought that planets had to orbit around stars, and astronomers have discovered the " orphan planet " in the universe. A new study is using NASA's Kepler Space Telescope to identify other interstellar planets drifting alone in the depths of space.
In the report, Eamonn Kerins, a researcher at the University of Manchester in the UK, said in a report that the Kepler Space Telescope has achieved what it never thought it could achieve, and it provides a closer proof of the number of wandering planets , which is of mass size on Earth.
In a research report published in the Monthly Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society, the research team used the data collected by the Kepler Space Telescope within two months of the K2 mission in 2016.
In the past two months, the Kepler Space Telescope was able to detect millions of stars in an area close to the center of Milky Way galaxy every 30 minutes. When analyzing the data, the research team hopes to see the rare gravitational microlens phenomenon. This phenomenon occurs because a huge object in front of it produces gravitational forces that refract the light like a magnifying glass, allowing scientists to see the more difficult-to-observe celestial bodies in the distance.
During the study, researchers discovered 27 microlens signals of different lengths with shorter durations, which can last for one hour at a short time and as long as 10 days at a long time.
Some of these signals have been captured in other data on the ground. However, we can see in the data that the four gravitational forces with the shortest duration are coexisting with the planets of Earth's mass.
If the Kepler telescope discovers a main star, or a star orbited by a planet, through a gravitational microlens event, scientists may expect to capture a longer signal. So, when scientists found evidence of the existence of the planet but did not find a longer-lasting signal associated with the main star, the research team would speculate that the planet was a wandering planet.
research report said that if these planets were indeed wandering planets in the universe, they might have formed around a star in the past, and then they were popped up from the original star system because they were affected by the gravity of other massive planets or other celestial bodies.
However, discovering the relevant signals is not an easy task, especially the design of the Kepler Space Telescope is not used for microlens detection, nor is it used to detect dense stellar areas. (The Kepler Space Telescope has been working in space for nearly a decade and officially stopped using it in November 2018. It uses the "transiting method" to detect planets. When the planet passes through the surface of the main star, the brightness of the main star will drop to a certain extent, so that the existence of the planet can be discovered.)
"These signals are very difficult to find." University of Manchester Researcher Ian "Our research is to use an old, blurry telescope to detect the densest areas of the sky, where thousands of bright stars are present and asteroids passing through our sight," McDonald wrote in the same report. "From the harsh noise, they try to detect the characteristic dim light emitted by the planets, they only have one chance to discover before the signal disappears," McDonald said. "In order to complete this study, the research team must develop new technologies to analyze the data for it. Although their discovery is impressive and exciting, they did not confirm the existence of these wandering planets. Other exploration missions will still be carried out in the future, such as the observations conducted by NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope and the Euclid mission of European Space Agency , which can detect signals from microlens events to confirm the existence of these strange planets.
Related knowledge
Interstellar planet, also known as Rogue planet, nomad planet, free-floating planet, Orphan planet, Lonely planet, roughly speaking, it is a planet that does not orbit any star, or only orbits galaxy[1]. Although it does not orbit any star body, it only has planetary mass [2]. They may be planets that were thrown out of the planetary system that originally orbited or revolved by the gravity of other celestial bodies such as other planets, or protoplanets that were ejected during the formation of the planetary system, causing them to wander in galaxies or the universe [3].
In 2011, scientists used gravity microlensing method to confirm the existence of interstellar planets for the first time, and speculated that the number of interstellar planets of the size of Jupiter in the Milky Way is twice as many as that of stars [4]. Although they wander in the interstellar world, it does not mean that they cannot support life - despite this, the life on it may be just bacteria-like microorganisms. In addition, some huge interstellar planets were born in the form of stars, rather than planets thrown away from the planetary system. This interstellar planet is defined as a secondary brown dwarf by the International Astronomical Union [5], such as , japanese, which has only 8 Jupiter mass, 110913-773444[6].
BY:Chelsea Gohd
FY:Awei
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