A powerful new telescope being developed by NASA is expected to reveal more than 100,000 previously uncharted planets outside of our solar system.
This will be a major leap from the 6300 planets discovered to date.
NASA says its Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will mark a major leap forward in the hunt for new planets.
It expects to find most of these “new worlds” in underexplored regions of the Milky Way, the galaxy where Earth and its solar system are located.
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center researcher Elisa Quintana said planet hunting had previously been confined mostly to “our own neighbourhood”.
“Roman will extend the search far enough to encompass other galactic habitats, which could help us learn how planet formation varies across different regions of the Milky Way,” she said.
“Most known exoplanets are located within a couple thousand light-years of Earth.
“But one of Roman’s core surveys will peer all the way through the Milky Way’s galactic bulge, the central hub where stars are packed more densely than anywhere else, to the fringes of the far side of the galaxy.”
NASA said in a statement that the Roman telescope would monitor stars scattered throughout a “deep slice” of the galaxy to watch for any that change in brightness.
It said some stars periodically dimmed as orbiting planets crossed in front of them.
Others temporarily appeared to brighten as the gravity of a star and orbiting planets magnified a farther star’s light.
Robby Wilson, a postdoctoral fellow at NASA Goddard, said stars with more heavy elements, particularly giant ones, tended to host more planets.
“By sampling completely different populations of stars and planets, Roman will take these studies to a whole new level,” he said.
“Astronomers may soon uncover how common planetary systems like our own are throughout the Milky Way.
“Roman will be especially powerful because it will observe hundreds of millions of distant stars, letting scientists compare faraway planet populations to those found nearby,”
To learn more about NASA’s Roman mission, click here
