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- Scientists have used gravitational lenses to detect a “rogue planet” that does not orbit a star and floats freely in space.
- The planet is relatively small, but researchers cannot say for sure how far it is from Earth.
- The Milky Way may be home to billions of these free planets.
We think of our solar system as typical, or even “normal”, but in the universe, there really is no normal. There are so many circumstances regarding planets, stars, moons, and other objects that there is no clear arrangement that the cosmos favors over any other, and there are even free-floating “rogue planets” that have escaped the systems in which they developed and they are just doing their own thing.
A new discovery of one of those rogue planets has just been described in a lengthy research article. The planet was discovered by two teams, one working with OGLE, the Optical Gravitational Lens Experiment, and KMTN, the Korean Microlensing Telescope Network. The only problem? No one really knows how far away the mysterious planet is.
As you may have gleaned from the names of the two projects that led to the discovery, the planet was found with the help of a technique called gravitational lensing. Gravity acts on everything, including light, and scientists have been able to use this to their advantage by using a distant light source and some object between it and Earth as a kind of invisible magnifying glass.
Gravity can deflect light around a planet, allowing us to see that light even if something in between is blocking our direct line of sight. In this case, the mysterious rogue planet acted as a lens, revealing light “behind” it and signaling its presence to scientists. Because the planet in this particular case is relatively small, with a mass probably less than that of Earth, which is already quite small, it was considered a microlensing event.
Microlensing simply refers to the fact that because the object was as small as it was, there was very little time to observe it while it produced the gravitational lensing effect. This means that it was not possible to pin down specific details about the planet, including its distance from Earth. The researchers report that it was visible for just over 40 minutes.
Researchers don’t know for sure, as no one has ever seen a planet “going rogue” before, but they believe that planets roughly Earth mass or less can occasionally be thrown out of their planetary systems early in their development. In those early ages of the system, the planets can interact with each other, pulling and pushing each other and sending them on dangerous journeys around their host stars, eventually resulting in planets that simply cannot stand up and move into space freely. There may be as many as trillions of “rogue” planets free-floating in our home galaxy alone, and without stars to orbit, they are probably quite cold and hostile.
Mike Wehner has reported on technology and video games for the past decade, covering the latest news and trends in virtual reality, wearable devices, smartphones, and future technology. Most recently, Mike served as the technology editor at The Daily Dot, and has been featured in USA Today, Time.com, and in many other print and web media. His love of reporting is second only to his addiction to games.
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