NASA's forthcoming Nancy Grace Roman Telescope will hunt for 'cosmic orphans,' starless planets that might even outnumber their orbiting counterparts in our galaxy.
Two papers describing the team's latest findings will be published in a future issue of The Astronomical Journal.Einstein's 1915 theory of general relativity predicts that objects with masses"warp" the very fabric of space. While this warping works in three dimensions , it can be thought of as analogous to the 2D effect of placing balls with different masses on a stretched rubber sheet. The larger the mass of the ball, the deeper the dent in the sheet.
Microlensing is a variation of this concept that happens when a smaller object, like a planet or star, slips between Earth and a background light source, like a star or galaxy, and comes into near-perfect alignment with the two. This causes Earth-based machines to detect a spike in the brightness of the background object, but one that's not as extreme as the effects of gravitational lensing.
Plus, the newly found roughly Earth-sized rogue planet represents just the second time such a world has been found using microlensing. The team behind the discovery suggests it means that rogue worlds are usually smaller planets with sizes similar to and smaller than the Earth.
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