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Freeman [soylentnews.org] writes:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/08/lots-of-earth-mass-rogue-planets-could-be-found-by-nasas-roman-telescope/ [arstechnica.com]

Planets that go rogue orbit no star. They wander the vacuum of space alone, having been kicked out of their star systems by gravitational interactions with other planets and stars. Nobody really knows how many rogue planets could be out there, but that may change in a few years.

Researchers from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and Osaka University in Japan have used the phenomenon of gravitational microlensing [arstechnica.com] to estimate the number of rogue planets that could be revealed in the heart of the Milky Way. They analyzed data from the Microlensing Observations in Astrophysics (MOA) [canterbury.ac.nz] survey that searched for gravitational microlensing events from 2006 to 2014 to figure out how many more of these events we could expect to find with NASA’s upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope.
[...]
“Gravitational microlensing enables us to study a variety of objects with masses ranging from that of exoplanets to black holes,” the researchers said in the first [arxiv.org] of two studies soon to be published in The Astronomical Journal. The second study can be found here [arxiv.org].

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