Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope can detect 400 interstellar planets in the Milky Way

According to a new announcement by the United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), soon The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will be launched and can help discover up to 400 interstellar planets in the Milky Way. The results have already been accepted by the scientific journal Astronomical Journal and suggest that there is already a candidate planet that should be studied by the new observatory.

Nancy Grace Roman Telescope Planned to launch into space in mid-May 2027. One of the biggest differences is that it can detect a greater amount of distant objects; differs from James Webb and Hubble, who generally captured images of a single point during each observation.

Nancy Grace Roman’s estimate that she could detect up to 400 interstellar planets came from a survey conducted by a team of astrophysicists from the Microlensing Observations in Astrophysics (MOA) institution – the study took nine years.

Scientists explain that Interstellar planets can only be detected using gravitational microlensingan effect from gravitational lensing. The big problem is that microlensing signals are rare, so detecting these planets is not such a simple task.

“Our Galaxy hosts 20 times more interstellar planets than stars — trillions of worlds wandering alone. “This is the first measurement of the number of rogue planets in the galaxy sensitive to planets smaller than Earth,” said senior researcher at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and co-author of two forthcoming papers.

Nancy Grace Roman Telescope and Interstellar Planets

To improve the detection of these planets, Roman Grace will be assisted by other ground-based telescopes, such as the Prime-focused Infrared Microlensing Experiment (PRIME) at the South African Astronomical Observatory. The telescope is equipped with four sensing instruments and is approximately 1.8 meters in diameter.

Scientists believe that from data collected by different observatories, it will be possible to collect a significant amount of data for studying interstellar planets. In fact, another study has already found candidates to test observations from the Nancy Roman Grace Space Telescope.

“A microlensing signal from an interstellar planet can last from a few hours to about a day, so astronomers will have a good chance of making simultaneous observations with the Rome and PRIME telescopes,” said Naoki Koshimoto, an assistant professor who led the paper on detecting an interstellar planet at Osaka University in Japan.

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