![]() Kepler was not designed to find planets using microlensing, nor to study the extremely dense star fields of the inner Galaxy. I am very excited that the upcoming ESA Euclid mission could also join this effort as an additional science activity to its main mission.” Now it passes the baton on to Roman that will be designed to find such signals, signals so elusive that Einstein himself thought that they were unlikely ever to be observed. It’s about as easy as looking for the single blink of a firefly in the middle of a motorway, using only a handheld phone.” Co-author Eamonn Kerins of The University of Manchester said: “Kepler has achieved what it was never designed to do, in providing further tentative evidence for the existence of a population of Earth-mass, free-floating planets. From that cacophony, we try to extract tiny, characteristic brightenings caused by planets, and we only have one chance to see a signal before it’s gone. Our observations pointed an elderly, ailing telescope with blurred vision at one the most densely crowded parts of the sky, where there are already thousands of bright stars that vary in brightness, and thousands of asteroids that skim across our field. ![]() Confirming the existence and nature of free-floating planets will be a major focus for upcoming missions such as the NASA Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, and possibly the ESA Euclid mission, both of which will be optimised to look for microlensing signals.ĭr McDonald said: “These signals are extremely difficult to find. Such planets may perhaps have originally formed around a host star before being ejected by the gravitational tug of other, heavier planets in the system. ![]() These new events do not show an accompanying longer signal that might be expected from a host star, suggesting that these new events may be free-floating planets. ![]()
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