Scientists from NASA and Japan’s Osaka University have jointly announced that the US space agency’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which could be launched by May 2027, will help find out about 400 Earth-mass rogue planets.
Rogue planets are not like normal planets. And they are not associated with any star in space and do not revolve around any other star. In simple terms, rogue planets are free-floating planets that are not bound by the gravitational force of a star. It is believed that there are many more rogue planets in space than there are planets orbiting stars.
It’s estimated that there are 20 times more rogue planets than stars in our galaxy, and trillions of worlds alone in space,” said David Bennett, a senior researcher and scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and a co-author of the paper. He also said that this is the first approximate measurement of a rogue planet, whose mass is equal to the mass of Earth.
The team previously conducted research called Microlensing Observations in Astrophysics (MOA) at New Zealand’s Mount John University Observatory for nine years.
“Microlensing is the only way we can find objects like low-mass free-floating planets and even primordial black holes,” said the Osaka University professor.
“It’s very exciting to discover objects that we can never see directly, using gravity,” he added.