The universe is immense, there is no doubt. For this reason, every day the scientists who are in charge of observing our known space, discover new data about the unknown in our space. The latest contribution has come from the Kepler Space Telescope which, although it was not intended for this, has managed to find up to four wandering planets circulating through space.
The British researchers who have carried out the finding have confirmed that these planets “float freely” through space without the need to be attached to a star.
Iain McDonald, a professor at the University of Manchester, has been commissioned to carry out this study thanks to data obtained by the Kepler Space Telescope in 2016 during one of its missions, K2.
Lonely planets could be floating free through the darkness of space, in new research in #MNRAS: https://t.co/IxyKMEgp1H pic.twitter.com/KvUg9Co5aP
— Royal Astronomical Society (@RoyalAstroSoc) July 6, 2021
Millions of stars
This 2016 mission lasted about two months and Kepler was able to observe millions of stars in the vicinity of our own galaxy, and up to 27 candidate microlensing signals of short duration and with timescales of between one hour and ten days were found .
The four shortest events reported represent new discoveries related to Earth, as they are wandering planets with similar mass to that of our planet.
These signs are extremely difficult to find . Our observations pointed an old and sick telescope with blurry vision to one of the most densely populated parts of the sky, where there are already thousands of bright stars that vary in brightness and thousands of asteroids that glide across our field »explained Professor McDonald in a statement related to your recent study.
In these results obtained, the short signal was not accompanied by a longer signal, which would be what we might expect from the so-called host star. This leads researchers to suggest that these four discoveries are free-roaming planets in space.
The researchers themselves suggest that these planets could have been created around a parent star, but that they were ejected by the gravitational pull of other planets with greater weight.
“Kepler has accomplished what it was never designed to do , by providing more tentative evidence for the existence of a population of floating land-mass planets.” explained Eammon Kerins, another of those responsible for the project, regarding the fact that the telescope has been able to observe this type of phenomenon, something that even Einstein himself thought was almost impossible to see.
