Study: Trillions of rogue planets of Earth mass or less roam our galaxy

Scientists have discovered a second candidate for terrestrial mass rogue planets. Such objects cannot be seen directly – they travel alone in interstellar space and are completely dark. It is possible to detect such a planet only by the effect of microlensing, when it changes the brightness of the background star by its gravity when passing next to it. According to 3Dnews, a new discovery has shown that there are many more rogue planets than expected. There are 20 times more of them in our galaxy than there are stars.

During the formation of planetary systems, planets of smaller mass can be most easily ejected from the system in the process of complex gravitational maneuvers of the embryos of planets of greater mass. This suggests that most of the rogue planets – floating alone between the stars – are terrestrial or less massive. Nine years of observations under the program of searching for rogue planets by the microlensing effect allow us to believe that there are a myriad of such planets in the Universe.

There are trillions of Earth-mass or lesser rogue planets in our galaxy, according to a team of scientists from NASA and Japan’s Osaka University who used the results of a program based on the work of the Mount John University Observatory in New Zealand. In fact, there may be 20 times as many as there are stars in the Milky Way, or six times as many as the worlds orbiting the stars in our galaxy.

The work on analyzing the demographics of wandering worlds and finding a second candidate for such a runaway world will be published later in The Astronomical Journal.

The new study has also changed the estimate of the chances of finding rogue planets by the upcoming Space Telescope. Nancy Grace Roman. If earlier it was expected to detect about 50 rogue planets of the earth mass, now scientists predict the possibility of detecting at least 400 such worlds.