Not billions, but trillions of planets have gone rogue in our galaxy

The planets in our solar system that have gone rogue do not number in billions, as was previously believed, but in trillions, scientists at NASA and Osaka University in Japan have estimated.

The estimate has been detailed in two papers reportedlyaccepted for publication in The Astronomical Journal, the New York Times reported.

The researchers have concluded that these planets are six times more abundant than worlds orbiting their own suns. The researchers have also identified the second Earth-size free floater ever detected.

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What are Rogue Planets?

Rogue planets are basically free-floating planets — dark, isolated orbs freely roaming the universe without any revolution to any host star. Let's say if the Earth stops revolving around Sun and doesn't end up revolving around some other host star in the meantime, it'll be called rogue.

How the estimation of total number of rogue planets has been made?

According to a report in the New York Times,David Bennett, an astronomer at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, and his team used nine years of data from the Microlensing Observations in Astrophysics telescope at the University of Canterbury Mount John Observatory in New Zealand.

Exoplanets were indirectly detected by an effect called microlensing.

The report adds that with help from empirical models, the researchers worked out the spread of the masses for more than 3,500 microlensing events.

This included stars, brown dwarfs and planet candidates.

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In the process, the scientists assessed data from one of these planet candidates to be compelling enough to claim the discovery of a new rogue Earth.

From this analysis, the scientistsestimate that there are about 20 times more free-floating worlds in our Milky Way than stars, with Earth-mass planets 180 times more common than rogue Jupiters.

Are most rogue planets Earth-sized or Jupiter-sized?

No, that is not the case. Most rogue worlds are small.

That’s because planetsgo rogue when two protoplanets slam into each other.

Since they are revolving around no one but are free in the vastness of the universe, the gravity is not strong enough to hold together big-sized planets out there in their rogue glory.

During this collision, theforce of the impact is so strong that it knocks out one of the emerging star systems altogether.

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