Reconstructing the Free-floating Planet Mass Function with the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope
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arXiv
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| Main Authors: | , , , |
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| Format: | Preprint |
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2025
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| _version_ | 1866910923962187776 |
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| author | DeRocco, William Penny, Matthew T. Johnson, Samson A. McGill, Peter |
| author_facet | DeRocco, William Penny, Matthew T. Johnson, Samson A. McGill, Peter |
| contents | Free-floating planets comprise one of the most enigmatic populations of exoplanets in the Galaxy. Though ground-based observations point to a large abundance of these worlds, little is known about their origins and demographics. In the coming years, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope's Galactic Bulge Time Domain Survey is expected to detect several hundred free-floating planets, providing the first opportunity to characterize these worlds at the population level. We present a first study of Roman's prospects for reconstructing the mass distribution of free-floating planets through population-level statistical inference. We find that depending on the true underlying mass distribution of free-floating planets in the Galaxy, Roman will be able to improve upon existing estimates of the abundance by orders of magnitudes in the largely unexplored mass range below that of Earth. When applied to Roman's observations, the methodology we present herein will be capable of discriminating between different hypothesized mass distributions at high statistical significance, opening a new window into the origins of these rogue worlds. |
| format | Preprint |
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arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_00092 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Reconstructing the Free-floating Planet Mass Function with the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope DeRocco, William Penny, Matthew T. Johnson, Samson A. McGill, Peter Earth and Planetary Astrophysics Astrophysics of Galaxies Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics Solar and Stellar Astrophysics Free-floating planets comprise one of the most enigmatic populations of exoplanets in the Galaxy. Though ground-based observations point to a large abundance of these worlds, little is known about their origins and demographics. In the coming years, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope's Galactic Bulge Time Domain Survey is expected to detect several hundred free-floating planets, providing the first opportunity to characterize these worlds at the population level. We present a first study of Roman's prospects for reconstructing the mass distribution of free-floating planets through population-level statistical inference. We find that depending on the true underlying mass distribution of free-floating planets in the Galaxy, Roman will be able to improve upon existing estimates of the abundance by orders of magnitudes in the largely unexplored mass range below that of Earth. When applied to Roman's observations, the methodology we present herein will be capable of discriminating between different hypothesized mass distributions at high statistical significance, opening a new window into the origins of these rogue worlds. |
| title | Reconstructing the Free-floating Planet Mass Function with the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope |
| topic | Earth and Planetary Astrophysics Astrophysics of Galaxies Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics Solar and Stellar Astrophysics |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.00092 |