Kepler captures floating planets- Royal Astronomical Society
Image: Physics.Org

Kepler captures floating planets- Royal Astronomical Society

Kepler captures floating planets. Recent research published in the paper of Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, states that the Kepler telescope captures floating planets. These floating pieces in space seem to have their world. As Kepler captures floating planets, it also observes that these planets are not associated with any universal star. And in addition to this, they have masses similar to that of our planet earth. Lain McDonald from the Manchester University, UK is the lead of the study. He collected the data from the 2016 K2 mission phase, which NASA’s Kepler space telescope led. And during the said mission, Kepler gathered nearly 27 short-duration microlensing signals as it monitored a group of millions of stars. So, among these were many amazing microlensing events.

Kepler telescope captures floating planets- Albert Einstein and Microlensing.

Scientific stories have it, that Einstein in his theory of relativity mentioned about stars being many stars’ light is exaggerated from a background star. So this may last from a few hours to a few days and taking an estimate, one in every million stars experience microlensing. But, as it was a designer for a different task. And it is interesting to see that the Kepler telescope captures floating planets. Its prime function was to observe a small portion of our Milky Way galaxy. But it ended up exceeding expectations for everyone.

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What do researchers say?

Along with lain, Eamonn Kerins is the co-author of the study at the University of Manchester. He quotes, “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. Now it passes the baton on to other missions that will be designed to find such signals. These signals so elusive that Einstein himself thought that they were unlikely ever to be observed. I am very excited that the upcoming ESA Euclid mission could also join this effort. This would be an additional science activity to its main mission”

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