Rogue Planet 101 Instagram story
- Visualizations by:
- Victoria Woodburn
- Graphics:
- Victoria Woodburn
- View full credits
Rogue Planets 101: What is a rogue planet? Well, rogue planets are freely floating bodies that drift through the galaxy untethered to a star.
Complete transcript available.
Rogue Planets 101: How do they form? They are commonly made by being ejected from planetary systems, but they can also form alone, similar to how stars are born.
Complete transcript available.
Rogue Planets 101: Why do we study them? Studying rogue planets will help scientists and astrophysicists better understand how planetary systems form and evolve.
Complete transcript available.
Rogue Planets 101: Roman will use the technique called microlensing to "see" rogue planets. when a rogue planet lines up with a star from our vantage point, it will bend and amplify the light from the star. allowing us to see this lonely planet.
Complete transcript available.
Rogue Planets 101: Fun fact, the universe could be teeming with rogue planets and we wouldn’t even know it. We would never find out without undertaking a thorough, space-based microlensing survey like Roman is going to do.
Complete transcript available.
Credits
Please give credit for this item to:
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center
Animator
- Victoria Woodburn (GSFC Interns) [Lead]
Graphic designer
- Victoria Woodburn (GSFC Interns) [Lead]
Producer
- Courtney A. Lee (ADNET)
Social media support
- Courtney A. Lee (ADNET)
Support
- Scott Wiessinger (KBRwyle)
Missions
This visualization is related to the following missions:Series
This visualization can be found in the following series:Related pages
Rogue Planet Animation
Aug. 21, 2020, 7 a.m.
Read moreThis illustration shows a rogue planet traveling through space.Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/R. Hurt (Caltech-IPAC) Rogue planets are free-floating planets that do not orbit a star and instead travel through space. Scientists think they are outcasts from developing planetary systems and may be very numerous throught the galaxy.
Roman Space Telescope Microlensing Animations
March 30, 2020, 6 a.m.
Read moreThis animation illustrates the concept of gravitational microlensing. When one star in the sky appears to pass nearly in front of another, the light rays of the background source star become bent due to the warped space-time around the foreground star. This star is then a virtual magnifying glass, amplifying the brightness of the background source star, so we refer to the foreground star as the lens star. If the lens star harbors a planetary system, then those planets can also act as lenses, each one producing a short deviation in the brightness of the source. Thus we discover the presence of exoplanets, and measure its mass and separation from its star. Credit: NASA s Goddard Space Flight Center/CI Lab