Monday, October 5, 2020

NASA’s New Telescope Will Help Astronomers Discover Free-Floating Worlds

Smithsonian shares how The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will be able to detect distant planets.

As astronomers discover more and more planets in galaxies far, far away, they are increasingly confronted with a curious subset of orbs that are free-floating and not connected to or orbiting a particular star. Further complicating matters is that within that group, most of what they have found are gassy, Jupiter-sized (read: large), planets; few resemble rockier planets like our own Earth.

First discovered in 2003, these potential free-floating planets are elusive and difficult to detect from the existing ground-based observatories.

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