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Kepler telescope glimpses a free-floating planet population
6 July 2021
Tantalising evidence has been uncovered for a mysterious population of ‘free-floating’ planets which may be alone in deep space, unbound to any host star.
The results include four new discoveries that are consistent with planets of similar masses to Earth, published today in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. The study, led by Dr Iain McDonald of The University of Manchester, UK, (now based at the Open University, UK) used data obtained in 2016 during the K2 mission phase of NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope.
During this two-month campaign, Kepler monitored a crowded field of millions of stars near the centre of our Galaxy every 30 minutes in order to find rare gravitational microlensing events.
The study team found 27 short-duration candidate microlensing signals that varied over timescales of between an hour and 10 days. Many of these had been previously seen in data obtained simultaneously from the ground. However, the four shortest events are new discoveries that are consistent with planets of similar masses to Earth.
More:
https://www.manchester.ac.uk/discover/news/kepler-telescope-glimpses-a-free-floating-planet-population/
