Puzzling evidence has been revealed for a mysterious group of “rogue” (or “floating”) planets , planets that may be alone in deep space and not connected to any host stars. The revelation includes four new findings that correspond to planets with masses similar to Earth.
A mysterious group of “floating” planets are sighted near the center of our galaxy
The find, which was just published in the Monthly Notice of the Royal Astronomical Society, revealed the possible presence of a mysterious population of “floating” planets – planets that appear to be in deep space and that appear to be the target. of new space missions in order to study them more closely.
The research, conducted by Iain McDonald of the University of Manchester, has used data obtained in 2016 during the K2 mission of NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope . During this two-month mission, Kepler monitored a very crowded portion of space with millions of stars near the center of our galaxy.
The study team found 27 signals, corresponding to planets of similar mass to Earth, but with the peculiarity of not having evidence of a nearby host star, which suggests that they may be “floating” planets . Such celestial bodies may have originally formed around a celestial body before being pushed out by the gravitational pull of other larger planets in the system.
What makes these results even more sensational is that Kepler was not designed to find these types of planets , nor to study the extremely dense star fields inside the Galaxy.
The same study co-author, Eamonn Kerins, commented : “ Kepler has achieved what it was not designed to do, providing more tentative evidence for the existence of a population of landmasses and floating planets. Now it will be necessary to pass the baton to other missions that will be designed to find such signals. signals so elusive that Einstein himself thought they were unlikely ever to be observed. I am very excited that ESA’s upcoming Euclid mission can also combine this effort as an additional scientific activity to its main mission. »
In fact confirming the existence and nature of “floating” planets will be an important goal for upcoming NASA missions , such as the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope and the aforementioned Euclid ESA mission, both optimized to search for signals that are very weak.
