Free-floating planets are a new class of planets recently discovered. These planets don’t orbit within stellar systems, instead living a nomadic life within the galaxy.
Rogue Planet
Posted inAstronomy & Telescopes, Brown Dwarfs, Exoplanets, -moons, -comets, Interstellar, Status Report
Free-Floating Planets, Survivor Planets, Captured Planets and Binary Planets from Stellar Flybys
In star clusters, close stellar encounters can strongly impact the architecture of a planetary system or even destroy it.
Posted inAstronomy & Telescopes, Exoplanets, -moons, -comets, Imaging & Spectroscopy, Status Report
Free-floating “Planets” In The Macrolensed Quasar Q2237+0305
It has been claimed that the variability of field quasars resembles gravitational lensing by a large cosmological population of free-floating planets with mass of about 10 Earths.
Posted inAstronomy & Telescopes, Europa, Imaging & Spectroscopy, Status Report
Constraints On Sub-terrestrial Free-floating Planets From Subaru Microlensing Oobservations
The abundance of protoplanetary bodies ejected from their parent star system is presently poorly-constrained. With only two existing optical observations of interstellar objects in the 108−1010 kg mass range and […]
Posted inAstronomy & Telescopes, Brown Dwarfs, Exoplanets, -moons, -comets, Imaging & Spectroscopy, Status Report
Terrestrial and Neptune Mass Free-Floating Planet Candidates From The MOA-II 9-year Galactic Bulge Survey
We report the discoveries of low-mass free-floating planet (FFP) candidates from the analysis of 2006-2014 MOA-II Galactic bulge survey data.
Posted inExoplanets, -moons, -comets, Interstellar, Missions & Hardware, Status Report
Chasing Nomadic Worlds: A New Class of Deep Space Missions
Nomadic worlds, i.e., objects not gravitationally bound to any star(s), are of great interest to planetary science and astrobiology. They have garnered attention recently due to constraints derived from microlensing […]
Posted inAstronomy & Telescopes, Exoplanets, -moons, -comets, Imaging & Spectroscopy, Press Release
New Study Reveals Roman Space Telescope Could Find 400 Earth-Mass Rogue Planets
New research by scientists from NASA and Japan’s Osaka University suggests that rogue planets – worlds that drift through space untethered to a star – far outnumber planets that orbit […]
Posted inAstronomy & Telescopes, Exoplanets, -moons, -comets, Imaging & Spectroscopy, Status Report
Free-floating or wide-orbit? Keck Adaptive-optics Observations Reveal No Host Stars Near Free-Floating Planet Candidates
Recent detections of extremely short-timescale microlensing events imply the existence of a large population of Earth- to Neptune-mass planets that appear to have no host stars.
Posted inAstronomy & Telescopes, Exoplanets, -moons, -comets, Status Report
Free-Floating Planet Mass Function from MOA-II 9-year Survey Towards The Galactic Bulge
We present the first measurement of the mass function of free-floating planets (FFP) or very wide orbit planets down to an Earth mass, based on microlensing data from the MOA-II […]
Posted inAstronomy & Telescopes, Brown Dwarfs, Exoplanets, -moons, -comets, Press Release
Rogue Planets And Brown Dwarfs: Predicting Populations Of Free-floating Planetary Mass Objects Observable With JWST
Free-floating (or rogue) planets are planets that are liberated (or ejected) from their host systems. Although simulations predict their existence in substantial numbers, direct observational evidence for free-floating planets with […]