Dozens of starless 'rogue' alien planets possibly spotted

[Judi Lynn]

By Chelsea Gohd about 18 hours ago



An artist's depiction of a rogue planet. (Image credit: Wikimedia Commons reproduced under a Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0)

In the study, which was published July 6 in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, the team used data that Kepler collected during a two-month stint in 2016 during the space telescope's K2 mission phase.
Astronomers have spotted more strange "free-floating" planets that could roam deep space untethered to any star.

While we might think that planets must need to orbit some kind of star, astronomers have detected such orphaned "rogues" before. And a new study uses data collected by NASA's planet-hunting Kepler space telescope to identify other possible exoplanets roaming freely on their own.

"Kepler has achieved what it was never designed to do, in providing further tentative evidence for the existence of a population of Earth-mass, free-floating planets," co-author Eamonn Kerins, a researcher at the University of Manchester in the U.K., said in a statement.

During this two-month period, Kepler observed a field of millions of stars near the center of our galaxy every 30 minutes. In analyzing this data, the team hoped to see signs of rare gravitational microlensing events, which occur when the gravity of a massive foreground object bends the light of a more-distant star or quasar, acting like a cosmic magnifying lens that allows scientists to see objects that might otherwise be too far to spot.

More:
https://www.space.com/possible-rogue-alien-planets-detected-kepler?utm_source=notification

[-misanthroptimist]

1. That's no rogue planet, it's a space station!

It's a trap!