Scientists have found the smallest rogue object in our Milky Way galaxy. They are about the size of Mars and Earth. Rogue planets are free-floating, non-star circling planets.
The earth, called OGLE-2016-BLG-1928, was discovered at Las Campanas Observatory in Chile by astronomers using the Warsaw Telescope.
The astronomers are part of the OGLE survey that started 28 years ago, one of the biggest and longest sky surveys. The OGLE survey astronomers point the telescope at the central regions of the Milky Way to detect millions of stars on clear nights.
On Thursday, the thesis was published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
According to new studies, these unconnected planets could outnumber our system's stars, but they are challenging to detect.
Microlensing events can see these otherwise unseen worlds, considering that rogue planets do not produce light like stars or even sufficiently radiation to be noticeable in infrared light.
Microlensing happens because, like black holes, the existence of something large will, in effect, warp space-time. But this process will happen around the planets, too.
For example, if a rogue planet is in conjunction with a distant star, the light would bend around the planet from that star, resulting in a magnifying impact. The variations in light around the earth may be used by astronomers to determine the planet's mass.
"If a massive object (a star or a planet) passes between an Earth-based observer and a distant source star, its gravity may deflect and focus light from the source. The observer will measure a short, brightening of the source star," said lead study author Przemek Mroz, a postdoctoral scholar at the California Institute of Technology, in a statement.
"Chances of observing microlensing are extremely slim because three objects - source, lens, and observer - must be nearly perfectly aligned. If we observed only one source star, we would have to wait almost a million years to see the source being microlensed."
Near the center of the Milky Way, surveys such as OGLE will track hundreds of millions of stars, offering them the greatest opportunity to observe microlensing occurrences.
The length of the microlensing event allows the object's mass to be calculated by researchers. The shorter the incident, the lower the object. Planets usually have microlensing activities that last several hours. Though the one for this modern world only lasted 42 minutes - the shortest occurrence yet verified.
"It was obvious when we first spotted this case that an incredibly tiny source must have triggered it," said study co-author Radoslaw Poleski, an astronomer at the University of Warsaw's Astronomical Observatory, in a statement.
Comprehending Rogue Worlds
The creation of a world is itself a chaotic, erratic process. Gas and dust clump together in disks around young stars and expand in size steadily to create planets.
But collisions with larger-scale objects, or even being too close to another planet circling the star, or the star itself, will knock the planet out of its structure.
And so the world is alone - they've gone rogue.
In isolated clouds of gas and dust, it's even probable that lonely planets will develop on their own.
Many more rogue planets may be discovered by the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, NASA's new observatory scheduled to be deployed in the mid-2020s.
Understanding these rogue planets may shed further light on planetary systems' creation, development, and disruption.
Scientists have so far detected quite a few rogue worlds. But the capability of the Roman Space Telescope would enable these wandering nomadic planets to be discovered and categorized.
By supplying details on how many there are and their masses, the Roman Telescope can help researchers decide how these planets form - which may help suggest their origin stories.
The latest studies utilizing ground-based telescope calculations have proposed that hundreds of rogue planets may be detected by the Roman Telescope, helping scientists consider how popular they are in the Milky Way. According to a new report, the telescope's observations could show that there are potentially more rogue planets than there are stars in our galaxy.
ALSO READ : Astronomers Catch Radio Signals Emanating from the Milky Way; Where Is the Source Coming From?
Check out more news and information on Space on Science Times.
