Posted on 08/21/2020 11:37:55 AM PDT by Red Badger
Artist’s conception of SIMP J01365663+0933473, a planetary-mass object beyond our Solar System. The object, about a dozen times more massive than Jupiter is traveling through space unaccompanied by any parent star.. Credit: Chuck Carter, NRAO/AUI/NSF
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Upcoming NASA mission will search for planets in the Milky Way without their own sun.
An upcoming NASA mission could find that there are more rogue planets — planets that float in space without orbiting a sun — than there are stars in the Milky Way, a new study theorizes.
“This gives us a window into these worlds that we would otherwise not have,” said Samson Johnson, an astronomy graduate student at The Ohio State University and lead author of the study. “Imagine our little rocky planet just floating freely in space — that’s what this mission will help us find.”
The study was published today in the Astronomical Journal.
The study calculated that NASA’s upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope could find hundreds of rogue planets in the Milky Way. Identifying those planets, Johnson said, will help scientists infer the total number of rogue planets in our galaxy. Rogue, or free-floating, planets are isolated objects that have masses similar to that of planets. The origin of such objects is unknown, but one possibility is they were previously bound to a host star.
“The universe could be teeming with rogue planets and we wouldn’t even know it,” said Scott Gaudi, a professor of astronomy and distinguished university scholar at Ohio State and a co-author of the paper. “We would never find out without undertaking a thorough, space-based microlensing survey like Roman is going to do.”
The Roman telescope, named for NASA’s first chief astronomer who was also known as the “mother” of the Hubble telescope, will attempt to build the first census of rogue planets, which could, Johnson said, help scientists understand how those planets form. Roman will also have other objectives, including searching for planets that do orbit stars in our galaxy.
That process is not well-understood, though astronomers know that it is messy. Rogue planets could form in the gaseous disks around young stars, similar to those planets still bound to their host stars. After formation, they could later be ejected through interactions with other planets in the system, or even fly-by events by other stars.
Or they could form when dust and gas swirl together, similar to the way stars form.
The Roman telescope, Johnson said, is designed not only to locate free-floating planets in the Milky Way, but to test the theories and models that predict how these planets formed.
Johnson’s study found that this mission is likely to be 10 times more sensitive to these objects than existing efforts, which for now are based on telescopes tethered to the Earth’s surface. It will focus on planets in the Milky Way, between our sun and the center of our galaxy, covering some 24,000 light years.
“There have been several rogue planets discovered, but to actually get a complete picture, our best bet is something like Roman,” he said. “This is a totally new frontier.”
Rogue planets have historically been difficult to detect. Astronomers discovered planets outside Earth’s solar system in the 1990s. Those planets, called exoplanets, range from extremely hot balls of gas to rocky, dusty worlds. Many of them circle their own stars, the way Earth circles the sun.
But it is likely that a number of them do not. And though astronomers have theories about how rogue planets form, no mission has studied those worlds in the detail that Roman will.
The mission, which is scheduled to launch in the next five years, will search for rogue planets using a technique called gravitational microlensing. That technique relies on the gravity of stars and planets to bend and magnify the light coming from stars that pass behind them from the telescope’s viewpoint.
This microlensing effect is connected to Albert Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity and allows a telescope to find planets thousands of light-years away from Earth–much farther than other planet-detecting techniques.
But because microlensing works only when the gravity of a planet or star bends and magnifies the light from another star, the effect from any given planet or star is only visible for a short time once every few million years. And because rogue planets are situated in space on their own, without a nearby star, the telescope must be highly sensitive in order to detect that magnification.
The study published today estimates that this mission will be able to identify rogue planets that are the mass of Mars or larger. Mars is the second-smallest planet in our solar system and is just a little bigger than half the size of Earth.
Johnson said these planets are not likely to support life. “They would probably be extremely cold, because they have no star,” he said. (Other research missions involving Ohio State astronomers will search for exoplanets that could host life.)
But studying them will help scientists understand more about how all planets form, he said.
“If we find a lot of low-mass rogue planets, we’ll know that as stars form planets, they’re probably ejecting a bunch of other stuff out into the galaxy,” he said. “This helps us get a handle on the formation pathway of planets in general.”
Reference: 21 August 2020, Astronomical Journal.
We are losing our moon, so stars losing their planets should not be much of a surprize at all.
The universe is incomprehensibly old, to we mere mortals. There are things we can never know, or even dream of.
I never saw the latest remake, but Carpenter’s Thing was great.
It and the original are both great, though very different.
The 2011 ‘prequel’ was supposed to be an account of the alleged events that took place just prior to the Carpenter movie, when the Norwegian team discovers the Thing. Without giving away the plot or any other details, the final scene cuts over to the sled dog/creature from the beginning of the Carpenter film running through the snow, towards the American base. That part of it was pretty nicely done and really dovetailed it to Carpenter’s opening scenes. I admit I was pleasantly impressed in how they worked that in, I didn’t see that one coming. I just found the plot and characters a bit on the watery side, but your mileage may vary. I didn’t get the Hawks/Carpenter suspense goosebumps out of it; it seemed a little too contrived and drawn from trying to rehash plot points from the other two (especially Carpenter’s) to try to knit it all together. It’s a decent, rainy Saturday night watch if you can find it, but I found it to be like the annoying, tagalong younger cousin to the other two. There’s supposedly a remake of The Thing curently in the works that incorporates elements of both previous films and the novella they were based on. Now we’re getting into uncharted ‘don’t mess with a classic’ territory here. That could easily lay a gigantic egg.
Thanks for the warning!
I’ve read the original “Who goes there” and it was very good. Tough to beat Carpenter’s film version, especially these days, but I’d love to be surprised.
Even with the method described in the article, I think we will only detect a small fraction of the rogue planets which exist.
Yeah, the most likely way we'll discover the nearest one is when it careens through our Solar System. It'll be fun.
Jupiter used up all the rouge.
OOOO that Jupiter!
Rogue planets. Danged old middle age eyesight!
Rogue! Danged old middle aged eyesight!
We need a new PC name for these things.
Size-challenged non-suns?
Call me a dwarf and I'll crush you with my gravity. You've been warned. ;-)
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left over by THAT world’s former occupants.............
What was the name of that book?
When World’s Collide....1933
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_Worlds_Collide
Very good early sci-fi story.
Thank you
It was the prototype for Flash Gordon................
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