"Surprising Discovery: Rogue Planets Outnumber Stars in Our Galaxy"

NASA's upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope could potentially discover at least 400 Earth-mass rogue planets in the heart of the Milky Way. Researchers from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and Osaka University used data from the Microlensing Observations in Astrophysics survey to estimate the number of rogue planets that could be revealed through gravitational microlensing. Rogue planets, which orbit no star and have been kicked out of their star systems, are difficult to detect due to their small size and lack of association with a star. However, gravitational microlensing can amplify their visibility by bending spacetime. The Roman telescope, set to launch in 2027, will search for these rogue planets and could potentially find trillions of them, outnumbering stars in our galaxy.