Astronomers discovered a new rogue planet that stalks in the file data collected by the Hubble Space Telescope, and the finding is thanks to a little chance, and a little help from the same genius, Albert Einstein.
The rogue planets, or “free floating”, are worlds that do not orbit a star. They win their dishonest state when they are expelled from their systems of origin due to the interactions with their planets brothers or through the gravitational stars caused by the stars that pass.
The most successful way to detect an extrasolar planet, or exoplanet, in general, waiting until it crosses or “transit”, the face of its parent star. However, being cosmic orphans without a star father, rebel planets cannot be detected in this way. Fortunately, a predicted phenomenon for the first time by Einstein in 1915 sacrifices a way of detecting these dishonest worlds.
“Floating planets, unlike the best known exoplanets, do not orbit any star. They move alone through the galaxy, in complete darkness, without sun to illuminate them. That makes them impossible to detect the use of the detection of Ligit, Przemek Mroz, a member of the study team and professor at the University of the Varia, told Space.com.”
How Einstein became a rogue planet hunter
Einstein’s general severity theory in 1915, general relativity, suggests that mass objects cause the very fabric of space to “deform.” The bigger the dough, the greater the warp and, therefore, the stronger the gravity that arises from the warp.
The gravitational lens arises when the light of a background source passes through the warp. Your path is curved. This can amplify that background source, an effect that astronomers use Hubble and the James Webb space telescope (JWST) to study extremely distant galaxies that generally use being too weak to see.
“This phenomenon occurs when a massive object, the lens, passes in front of a distant star (the source), increasing the light of the star due to the severity of the lens,” Mroz explained. “The beauty of the microlent is that it works if the lens object does not emit any light.
“Duration microse events, the star of origin is temporarily magnified. We can estimate the mass of the lens object by measuring the duration and other properties of the event.”
Mroz added that when microlent events are generated by Rogue planets, they are usmentally very short, and last less than a day.
The particular microlent event that the team studied to reveal this new rogue world is designated OLLE-2023-BLG-0524 and Hubble observed on May 22, 2023, remaining buried in data of the space telescope.
“It was discovered in the direction of the galactic bulge by the optical gravitational lens experiment [OGLE] Survey, and observed independently by the Korea microleens telescope network [KMTNet]”Mroz said.” The Einstein’s time scale of the event was only eight hours, which made it one of the most registered microlent events. “
According to the properties of the microlating event, Mroz and his colleagues were able to estimate that the object of the lens body could be a locet of the Neptune-Mass planet located on the galactic disc of the Milky Way, about 15,000 light years away. Alternatively, the rebel world could be an object of dough from Saturna larger but farther in the galactic bulge of the Milky Way, approximately 23000 light years away.
“Both scenarios are consistent with the microlent signal we observe,” Mroz said.
Planet hunting in Hubble files
One of the most important tasks that faced the team when discovering the event of Microlent Ogy-2023-BLG-0524 was determining that this was caused by a dishonest planet, and not by a planet associated with a star, but.
They reasoned that if the planet had a nearby host star, within 10 times the distance between the Earth and the Sun (10 Au), they would probably have seen a second most more duration of the star. The researchers did not see such a signature, so they could rule out that the planet had a close star partner.
However, if the planet orbits a star in a much broader separation, more than 10 au, the chances of detecting the guest star are much lower.
“This means that we cannot face the scenario of wide orbit, but this is where it becomes interesting,” said Mroz. “Because the lens and the background star slowly move from each other, they will possibly separate in the sky.
“If we detect the light of the lens object at that time, we will know that it is not a complete complete flotation.”
Unfortunately, Mroz explained that the distance between the planet and the background star means that its relative movement seems incredible small, approximately 5 thousands per year.
“It will have at least a decade that we can expect to solve them with current instruments, such as Hubble space telescope or large terrestrial telescopes,” Mroz said.
Hubble was particularly useful on this rogue planet Hunt, the sky region that houses the microlent event was observed by the long service space in 1997. That is approximately 25 years before the microlent event.
“That cools a unique opportunity to try if there could be a star associated with the lens,” Mroz said. “ACCORDANCE TO OUR MODEL, By 1997, The Lens and Source Should Have Been Separated by 0.13 Arcseconds. That’s Tiny, But Within Hubble’s Capabilities. If the Lens Were a Bright Star, We Woold has ben ie it in Thu It it it it it it it it is it it “Tot Old itet” tet itet “tet it” tet “tet it it it. “
The absence of detectable light in the expected lens position told the team that any potential host star would have to be very weak.
“Depanding on the stellar population model we use, which rules out about 25% to 48% of the possible complementary stars,” Mroz said. “That pushes us more towards the conclusion that this can really be a floating planet.”
Mroz explained that OGLE-2023-BLG-0524 was discovered by the Mateusz team member Kapusta by chance while the team was following the microlating events.
“This discovery was partly serendipia!” Mroz said. “It was a rest of luck, but we believe there are many more hidden opportunities in the data.
“Microlent events occur all the time in dense star fields, and Hubble has observed many of those fields in the past. That means there could be more interesting events waiting to be discovered in Hubble data.”
Team research is available as a predimpression in the Arxiv paper repository.
