NASA and Osaka University scientists in Japan, discovered a rogue planet about the size of Earth earlier this week. It is said in this way to the worlds that wander lonely through the universe, without orbiting a massive star, as we do the Sun.
Detecting these types of worlds is difficult. One of the methods to find exoplanets is to first look at a star and capture the dim moments of its brightness. That means that there is a giant body doing a translation process.
So, since there is no massive star involved, things get difficult to find a rocky body. in the middle of the immense darkness of the universe.
According to a review by Between Media, the world that they recently detected, in addition to traveling without orbit, is similar in size to Earth. It is only the second of its type that they manage to find, which makes scientists calculate that they are abundant in a massive way in the Milky Way and the entire universe.
Previous estimates indicated that there were “millions”. But now they raise the calculation to millions of millions (trillions). How did they detect them? The aforementioned medium explains that the exoplanets were found indirectly. They measured how its gravity warped and stretched the light from distant stars behind it.
“With empirical models, the researchers calculated the dispersion of the masses of more than 3,500 cases of microlensing. The data that the investigation produced was convincing enough for the team to be able to affirm that they had discovered a planet the size of Earth.
In the same calculation, experts say that in the Milky Way there are six times more of these types of planets than those that make up a solar system.
Are they capable of harboring life?
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center astronomer David Bennett explains that without a host star, these worlds are likely dark. That does not mean that they necessarily have to be cold.
There is a way to coexist without a star, if that were the case, in which hydrogen found in the atmosphere of a planet could act as a greenhouse and keep the heat that is produced from inside the planet.
However, Bennett explains that at the moment we do not have a technology that will help us search for life on said celestial bodies.