NASA’s exoplanet hunter TESS may have spotted its first rogue planet

NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) may have discovered its first free-floating or "orphaned" planet. That's a planet wandering through the cosmos, without a star, all alone.

The potential discovery shows that TESS can use a phenomenon first suggested by Albert Einstein more than 100 years ago to detect these so-called rogue planets.

Despite the fact that we are most familiar with planets orbiting a parent star (or stars) having discovered more than 5,000 exoplanets that occur in such an arrangement, the Milky Way is estimated to be populated with a large number of free-floating rogue planets. , at.

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