Posted on Aug 22, 2020 in Astronomy, Science

Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere, said Carl Sagan. So, imagine a galaxy filled with tens of millions of black holes and dark, lifeless island worlds rogue, free-floating planets unmoored from the gravity and the life-giving light of an alien star. It is now is becoming increasingly apparent that the Milky Way may be just such a galaxy. An upcoming NASA mission could find that there are more rogue planetsplanets that float in space without orbiting a sunthan there are stars in the Milky Way, a new study theorizes.

This gives us a window into these worlds that we would otherwise not have, said Samson Johnson, at The Ohio State University and lead author of the study. Imagine our little rocky planet just floating freely in spacethats what this mission will help us find.

The Roman Telescope

The study calculated that NASAs upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope could find hundreds of rogue planets in the Milky Way. Identifying those planets, Johnson said, will help scientists infer the total number of rogue planets in our galaxy. Rogue, or free-floating, planets are isolated objects that have masses similar to that of planets. The origin of such objects is unknown, but one possibility is they were previously bound to a host star.

The Invisible Galaxy 100 Million Black Holes Lurking in the Milky Way

The universe could be teeming with rogue planets and we wouldnt even know it, said Scott Gaudi, a professor of astronomy and distinguished university scholar at Ohio State and a co-author of the paper. We would never find out without undertaking a thorough, space-based microlensing survey like Roman is going to do.

The Roman telescope, named for NASAs first chief astronomer who was also known as the mother of the Hubble telescope, will attempt to build the first census of rogue planets, which could, Johnson said, help scientists understand how those planets form. Roman will also have other objectives, including searching for planets that do orbit stars in our galaxy.

That process is not well-understood, though astronomers know that it is messy. Rogue planets could form in the gaseous disks around young stars, similar to those planets still bound to their host stars. After formation, they could later be ejected through interactions with other planets in the system, or even fly-by events by other stars. Or they could form when dust and gas swirl together, similar to the way stars form.

The Roman telescope, Johnson said, is designed not only to locate free-floating planets in the Milky Way, but to test the theories and models that predict how these planets formed.

Search Will Span 24,000 Light Years of the Milky Way

Johnsons study found that this mission is likely to be 10 times more sensitive to these objects than existing efforts, which for now are based on telescopes tethered to the Earths surface. It will focus on planets in the Milky Way, between our sun and the center of our galaxy, covering some 24,000 light years.

There have been several rogue planets discovered, but to actually get a complete picture, our best bet is something like Roman, he said. This is a totally new frontier.

The mission, which is scheduled to launch in the next five years, will search for rogue planets using a technique called gravitational microlensing. That technique relies on the gravity of stars and planets to bend and magnify the light coming from stars that pass behind them from the telescopes viewpoint.

This illustration shows a rogue planet drifting through the galaxy alone. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/R. Hurt (Caltech-IPAC)

Gravitational Microlensing Einsteins General Relativity

This microlensing effect is connected to Albert Einsteins Theory of General Relativity and allows a telescope to find planets thousands of light-years away from Earthmuch farther than other planet-detecting techniques. Because microlensing works only when the gravity of a planet or star bends and magnifies the light from another star, the effect from any given planet or star is only visible for a short time once every few million years. And because rogue planets are situated in space on their own, without a nearby star, the telescope must be highly sensitive in order to detect that magnification.

The study estimates that this mission will be able to identify rogue planets that are the mass of Mars or larger. Mars is the second-smallest planet in our solar system and is just a little bigger than half the size of Earth.

Johnson said these planets are not likely to support life. They would probably be extremely cold, because they have no star, he said. (Other research missions involving Ohio State astronomers will search for exoplanets that could host life.) Studying them will help scientists understand more about how all planets form, he said.

If we find a lot of low-mass rogue planets, well know that as stars form planets, theyre probably ejecting a bunch of other stuff out into the galaxy, he said. This helps us get a handle on the formation pathway of planets in general. As many as six billion Earth-like planets in our galaxy, according to new estimates

Source: Samson A. Johnson et al. Predictions of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope Galactic Exoplanet Survey. II. Free-floating Planet Detection Rates, The Astronomical Journal (2020). DOI: 10.3847/1538-3881/aba75b , iopscience.iop.org/article/10. 847/1538-3881/aba75b

The Daily Galaxy, Sam Cabot, via The Ohio State University

Image credits: NASA

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