|
Piercing the heart of a globular star cluster, 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 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 mass of the intervening objects could be as little as 80 times that of Earth. Bodies this small have never been detected by microlensing observations.
EDITORS NOTE: For additional information, please contact Dr. Kailash Sahu, Space Telescope Science Institute, 3700 San Martin Drive, Baltimore, MD 21218, 410-338-4930 (phone), ksahu@stsci.edu (e-mail).
Images, illustrations, and animation for this release are available on the Web at: http://oposite.stsci.edu/pubinfo/pr/2001/20, and via links in http://hubble.stsci.edu/go/news http://oposite.stsci.edu/pubinfo/latest.html, http://oposite.stsci.edu/pubinfo/pictures.html and http://hubble.esa.int.
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).
This release is issued jointly by NASA and ESA.
To receive STScI press releases electronically, send an Internet electronic mail message to public-request@stsci.edu. Leave the subject line blank, and type the word subscribe in the body of the message. The system will respond with a confirmation of the subscription, and you will receive new press releases as they are issued. Please subscribe using the email account with which you would like to receive list messages. To unsubscribe, send email to public-request@stsci.edu. Leave the subject line blank, and type the word unsubscribe in the body of the message. Please unsubscribe using the email account that you used to subscribe to the list.
CONTACT: Ray Villard, Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, MD, Phone: 410-338-4514; E-mail: villard@stsci.edu. Kailash Sahu Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, MD Phone: 410-338-4930; E-mail: ksahu@stsci.edu. Nino Panagia, European Space Agency/Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, MD Phone: 410-338-4916; E-mail: panagia@stsci.edu. Lars Lindberg Christensen Hubble European Space Agency Information Center, Garching, Germany Phone: 49-0-89-3200-6306; Cellular-24 hr: 49-0-173-38-72-621; E-mail: lars@eso.org.
PRESS RELEASE NO.: STScI-PR01-20
Journal
Nature