Why in news
The Euclid space telescope has discovered seven more rogue planets, shining a light on the dark and lonely worlds floating freely through the universe untethered to any star.
Without being bound to a star, as the Earth is to the Sun, there are no days or years on these planets, which languish in perpetual night.
Yet scientists believe there is a chance they could be able to host life -- and estimate there may be trillions dotted throughout the Milky Way
They were spotted in the Orion Nebula, the nearest star-forming region to Earth
Euclid space telescope
Euclid is a wide-angle space telescope with a 600-megapixel camera to record visible light, a near-infrared spectrometer, and photometer, to determine the redshift of detected galaxies.
It was developed by the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Euclid Consortium and was launched on 1 July 2023 from Cape Canaveral in Florida
ESA's Euclid mission is designed to explore the composition and evolution of the dark Universe.
The space telescope will create a great map of the large-scale structure of the Universe across space and time by observing billions of galaxies out to 10 billion light-years, across more than a third of the sky.
Euclid will explore how the Universe has expanded and how structure has formed over cosmic history, revealing more about the role of gravity and the nature of dark energy and dark matter.
Rogue planets
A rogue planet, also termed a free-floating planet (FFP) or an isolated planetary-mass object (iPMO), is an interstellar object of planetary mass which is not gravitationally bound to any star or brown dwarf.
Rogue planets may originate from planetary systems in which they are formed and later ejected, or they can also form on their own, outside a planetary system.
The Milky Way alone may have billions to trillions of rogue planets
COMMENTS