![\"Astronomers](\"https:\/\/wp-assets.futurism.com\/2020\/10\/earth-sized-rogue-planet-floating-around-without-star-300x158.jpg\")
<\/div>Astronomers have spotted something strange and oddly sad: a rogue planet floating freely, without a star.<\/p>
It’s an example of what astronomers call a “rogue planet.” Some are believed to start as normal planets, but leave their stars after colliding with another object that sends them flying into space like a billiard ball. Other rogue planets may also form when clouds of gas and dust implode to form a planet rather than a star.<\/p>
“The universe could be teeming with rogue planets and we wouldn’t even know it,” Scott Gaudi, a professor of astronomy at Ohio State University who helped discover the new planet, said in a NASA statement<\/a>.<\/p> The planet spotted by Gaudi and his colleagues turned out to be roughly the mass of Earth or Mars.<\/p> What makes planets like it extremely difficult to spot is that they’re very dim, since there are no stars nearby to light them up. That’s why we’ve only spotted a few of these worlds so far.<\/p> Making them even more difficult to identify is the fact that they tend to be very cool, meaning that they don’t show up on infrared telescopes.<\/p> To spot the latest rogue planet, Gaudi’s team used a new technique called “microlensing,” as detailed in a preprint<\/a> uploaded to the archive arXiv<\/em> this week. The technique observes the warping changes the mass has on the fabric of space-time.<\/p> Basically, when a rogue planet moves in front of a more distant star, the light from that star bends around the rogue planet from our vantage point as it passes through the warped fabric of space-time near the planet. The more massive the planet, the more extreme the effect.<\/p> The team used NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope to spot the lonely planet — a feat that would’ve been impossible without the specialized ‘scope, according to the team behind the discovery.<\/p> “The microlensing signal from a rogue planet only lasts between a few hours and a couple of days and then is gone forever,” Matthew Penny, assistant professor of physics and astronomy at Louisiana State University and c0-author of the paper, said in the NASA statement. “This makes them difficult to observe from Earth, even with multiple telescopes. Roman is a game-changer for rogue planet searches.”<\/p> Roman is designed to hunt these rogue planets and to see how common they are. Such a discovery could influence the way we understand the formation and evolution of planets.<\/p> “We would never find out without undertaking a thorough, space-based microlensing survey like Roman is going to do,” Gaudi added.<\/p> READ MORE: <\/strong>A Rogue Earth-Mass Planet Has Been Discovered Freely Floating in the Milky Way Without a Star<\/a> [Universe Today<\/em>] More on rogue planets:<\/strong> Life Could Exist On “Rogue Planets” That Don’t Have Stars<\/a><\/em><\/p> The post An Earth-Sized Planet Is Floating Around Without a Star<\/a> appeared first on Futurism<\/a>.<\/p> Go here to see the original: Astronomers have spotted something strange and oddly sad: a rogue planet floating freely, without a star. It\u2019s an example of what astronomers call a \u201crogue planet.\u201d Some are believed to start as normal planets, but leave their stars after colliding with another object\u00a0that sends them flying into space like a billiard ball. Continue reading
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An Earth-Sized Planet Is Floating Around Without a Star<\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"