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Microlensing strikes again. Astronomers have been using the technique to detect everything from rogue planets to the most distant star ever seen. Now, astronomers have officially found another elusive object that has long been theorized, and that Universe Today first reported on back in 2009 but has never directly detected – a rogue black hole. That detection comes at the end of a 6-year observational campaign, with dozens of authors collaborating on a paper recently published in arXiv (meaning it has not yet been peer-reviewed). Those six years of painstakingly gathered data all started back in 2011, when a star...

Interstellar space is a graveyard of lost souls. Adrift far from any star, these planets float in the darkness like ghost ships in the night. Catching sight of one requires patience, and a good eye. But a new approach based on tens of thousands of images collected by the European Southern Observatory's facilities has resulted in the identification of as many as 170 potential 'rogue' worlds in our corner of the galaxy. If a good fraction of them are confirmed to be planets, it would suggest the Milky Way is swarming with solar exiles. "There could be several billions of...

What could happen to the earth in the distant future if we don't have the sun to keep us warm anymore or allow plants to grow. 9 minutes 45 seconds long.

An artist’s impression of a gravitational microlensing event by a free-floating planet. Credit: Jan Skowron / Astronomical Observatory, University of Warsaw ============================================================================= Our Galaxy may be teeming with rogue planets, gravitationally unbound to any star. An international team of scientists, led by Polish astronomers, has announced the discovery of the smallest Earth-sized free-floating planet found to date. Over four thousand extrasolar planets have been discovered to date. Although many of the known exoplanets do not resemble those in our solar system, they have one thing in common — they all orbit a star. However, theories of planet formation and evolution...

New simulations show that NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will be able to reveal myriad rogue planets – freely floating bodies that drift through our galaxy untethered to a star. Studying these island worlds will help us understand more about how planetary systems form, evolve, and break apart. Astronomers discovered planets beyond our solar system, known as exoplanets, in the 1990s. We quickly went from knowing of only our own planetary system to realizing that planets likely outnumber the hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy. Now, a team of scientists is finding ways to improve our understanding...

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 ================================================================================ 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,”...

A massive glowing "rogue" planetary-mass object has been discovered, surprising scientists with not only its size, but also the fact it's not orbiting a star. The object, named SIMP J01365663+0933473, has a magnetic field more than 200 times stronger than Jupiter’s and is nearly 13 times the size of the gas giant. At its size, it's right between the size of a planet and a failed star, so scientists will need to study it further to determine exactly what it is. “This object is right at the boundary between a planet and a brown dwarf, or ‘failed star,’ and is...

An international team of astronomers has discovered an exotic young planet that is not orbiting a star. This free-floating planet, dubbed PSO J318.5-22, is just 80 light-years away from Earth and has a mass only six times that of Jupiter. The planet formed a mere 12 million years ago—a newborn in planet lifetimes. It was identified from its faint and unique heat signature by the Pan-STARRS 1 (PS1) wide-field survey telescope on Haleakala, Maui. Follow-up observations using other telescopes in Hawaii show that it has properties similar to those of gas-giant planets found orbiting around young stars. And yet PSO...

This free-floating planet, dubbed PSO J318.5-22, is just 80 light-years away from Earth and has a mass only six times that of Jupiter. The planet formed a mere 12 million years ago -- a newborn in planet lifetimes.

A rogue, planet-size object 20 light-years away from Earth has stunned astronomers with its incredibly powerful magnetic field. The scientists found that the object's magnetic field is more than 200 times stronger than Jupiter's, which, in turn, is between 16 and 54 times stronger than Earth's, according to NASA. How the object, which scientists call SIMP J01365663+0933473, can maintain a magnetic field so strong, as well as generate spectacular auroras, is still unclear. "This particular object is exciting because studying its magnetic dynamo mechanisms can give us new insights on how the same type of mechanisms can operate in extrasolar...

A bizarre rogue planet without a star is roaming the Milky Way just 20 light-years from the Sun. And according to a recently published study in The Astrophysical Journal, this strange, nomadic world has an incredibly powerful magnetic field that is some 4 million times stronger than Earth’s. Furthermore, it generates spectacular auroras that would put our own northern lights to shame. The new observations, made with the National Science Foundation’s Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA), not only are the first radio observations of a planetary-mass object beyond our solar system, but also mark the first time...

Astronomers using the National Science Foundation's Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) have made the first radio-telescope detection of a planetary-mass object beyond our Solar System. The object, about a dozen times more massive than Jupiter, is a surprisingly strong magnetic powerhouse and a "rogue," traveling through space unaccompanied by any parent star. "This object is right at the boundary between a planet and a brown dwarf, or 'failed star,' and is giving us some surprises that can potentially help us understand magnetic processes on both stars and planets," said Melodie Kao, who led this study while a graduate...

Conspiracy theorists are claiming that a rogue planet will disrupt Earth’s orbit this Sunday and bring about a series of catastrophic earthquakes that could decimate life as we know it Nibiru, also known as Planet X, was originally supposed to destroy our world on Sept. 23... But that day came and went without an apocalypse in sight.  Now theorists say that Nibiru will come near our planet this weekend and throw off our gravitational forces and with it, bring hellfire and brimstone. Nibiru is a hypothesized planet located on the outer edges of our solar system that allegedly completes one...

The American space agency says that one object is a massive comet, but has so far been unable to identify the other NASA recently spotted two massive space objects hurtling towards Earth. While the American space agency has pinpointed one as a comet, the other has left it slightly more baffled. The comet is set to fly close to Earth this week, but the mystery object isn't expected to make an appearance until February. The object, dubbed "2016 WF9", was detected by NASA's asteroid- and comet-hunting NEOWISE project on 27 November 2016. It is roughly 0.3 to 0.6 miles (0.5...

Astronomers are beginning to glimpse what exoplanets orbiting distant suns are actually like. The trickle of discoveries has become a torrent. Little more than two decades after the first planets were found orbiting other stars, improved instruments on the ground and in space have sent the count soaring: it is now past 2,000. The finds include 'hot Jupiters', 'super-Earths' and other bodies with no counterpart in our Solar System - and have forced astronomers to radically rethink their theories of how planetary systems form and evolve. Yet discovery is just the beginning. Astronomers are aggressively moving into a crucial phase...

A group of astronomers from the US, Europe, Chile and South Africa have determined that 70,000 years ago a recently discovered dim star is likely to have passed through the solar system's distant cloud of comets, the Oort Cloud. No other star is known to have ever approached our solar system this close - five times closer than the current closest star, Proxima Centauri. In a paper published in Astrophysical Journal Letters, lead author Eric Mamajek from the University of Rochester and his collaborators analyzed the velocity and trajectory of a low-mass star system nicknamed "Scholz's star." The star's trajectory...

A study published in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters posits that Mars formed in what today is the Asteroid Belt, roughly one and a half times as far from the Sun as its current position, before migrating to its present location. The assumption has generally been that Mars formed near Earth from the same building blocks, but that conjecture raises a big question: why are the two planets so different in composition? Mars contains different, lighter, silicates than Earth, more akin to those found in meteorites. In an attempt to explain why the elements and isotopes on Mars...

Toronto– A close encounter with Jupiter about four billion years ago may have resulted in another planet’s ejection from the solar system altogether, scientists have found. The existence of a fifth giant gas planet at the time of the solar system’s formation — in addition to Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune that we know of today — was first proposed in 2011, researchers said.

U.S. geochemists challenged commonly held theories about how gases are expelled from the Earth and how a planet's atmosphere is formed. Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute researchers said their new theory could change the way scientists view the timing and mechanism involved in the formation of Earth's atmosphere, as well as the atmospheres of Mars and Venus. The team, led by Professor E. Bruce Watson, said it has found substantial evidence that argon atoms are strongly bound in the minerals of Earth's mantle and move through those minerals at a much slower rate than previously thought. In fact, they said they discovered...

IN THE dark reaches of the solar system lurk swarms of hidden worlds. Too small and too distant to reflect sunlight, they have remained under the cover of darkness for billions of years. But now the outer solar system is giving up its secrets. And with them comes an astonishing claim: "It's quite possible that there is a halo of planets surrounding our solar system, just waiting to be found," says Eugene Chiang, an astronomer at the University of California, Berkeley. What makes Chiang's claim so surprising is the sheer number and size of these planets. Weighing more than...