Are rogue planets common? NASA hopes its new telescope will find out

[Mike Wehner]

• NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will be able to detect rogue planets by spotting their gravitational lensing.
• The telescope, which is slated to launch in 2025, could spot hundreds of free-floating planets that don't orbit stars.
• Understanding free-floating worlds could help us to better understand how planets of all types form.

We tend to think of our solar system as the standard for planetary systems. A big star in the middle and a bunch of planets with a variety of personalities orbiting it. As it turns out, planets orbiting a star might actually be the weird ones, with free-floating "rogue" planets being closer to the norm.

As SciTechDaily reports, NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which is slated to launch sometime in 2025, could help astronomers find a whole bunch of these adventurous worlds cruising freely through our home galaxy. A new paper published in The Astronomical Journal suggests that the telescope will be well-suited to detecting such planets.

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Are rogue planets common? NASA hopes its new telescope will find out originally appeared on BGR.com on Mon, 24 Aug 2020 at 20:04:17 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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