The Hunt for Moons of Rogue Planets ⚡ экспресс
Scientists used the JWST to hunt for moons around the solitary planet WISE 0855—like a wandering Earth without a star. Like a flashlight, the telescope caught shadows of passing moons, but found none. However, they calculated: if you check several such planets, the chance to spot a moon is high. How many lonely planets hide moons in the dark?
In the vast darkness of interstellar space, the rogue planet WISE 0855 flickers with a barely perceptible heat glow, like a cooling ember. Its temperature is only a few dozen degrees above freezing — if life existed there, it would see a sunless sky, in an eternal icy haze. The James Webb telescope stared intently at this faint light for 11 hours, hoping to catch the shadow of a passing moon — as if a microscopic soot particle momentarily eclipsed a smoldering ember.
Astronomers built a model predicting the “ember’s” wavering and hunted in the data for dips — moon traces. No direct finds occurred, but the researchers tested their method by injecting artificial moons into the data. If a shadow dimmed the light by at least 0.5%, the detector triggered in 96% of cases, corresponding to a Titan-sized moon.
🎯 WISE 0855 is one of the coldest objects known beyond the Solar System: its temperature is just a few dozen degrees above freezing. If intelligent life were there, it would see a sky without any sun, perpetually shrouded in water-ice fogs.
🎬 Rogue planets with moons are almost a ready-made illustration for Isaac Asimov’s story “The Wanderer”: the characters live on a moon of an orphan planet, warmed only by internal heat.