NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has uncovered tantalizing clues to what could be a strange and unexpected population of wandering planet-sized objects. The orbiting Hubble observatory detected these bodies in the globular cluster M22 by the way their gravity bends the light from background stars, a phenomenon called microlensing.
These microlensing events were unusually brief, indicating that the intervening objects could be 80 times more massive than Earth. Bodies this small have never before been detected by microlensing observations.
The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc. (AURA), for NASA, under contract with the Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD. The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA).
Images, illustrations and animation are available at these URLs:
http://oposite.stsci.edu/pubinfo/pr/2001/20
http://hubble.stsci.edu/go/news
http://oposite.stsci.edu/pubinfo/latest.html
http://oposite.stsci.edu/pubinfo/pictures.html
http://hubble.esa.int
[Contact: Dr. Kailash Sahu, Nino Panagia, Lars Lindberg Christensen, Ray Villard ]
28-Jun-2001
