Free-floating planets in the era of Roman

The Roman Space Telescope's Galactic Bulge Time Domain Survey will provide a new window into the demographics of free-floating planets, planets unbound to any star. The mass and velocity distributions of this population hold key insights into their formation mechanisms and the growth of planetary systems in a short-lived period of early dynamical instability that is otherwise difficult to probe observationally. In this talk, I will show the results of the first simulation-based prediction for the Galactic free-floating planet mass function and connect these results to particular features in the mass function that Roman will be able to observe.

Dr. William DeRocco is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Maryland working primarily on preparing for the upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. He received his Ph.D. in theoretical physics from Stanford University in 2021 and worked as a postdoc at the University of California, Santa Cruz for three years prior to his current position. His work has spanned a large range of fields, including dark matter, gravitational waves, and exoplanets. Currently, he serves as the chair of the free-floating planet working group for the Roman mission and is actively pursuing both the theoretical and observational sides of this poorly-understood exoplanetary demographic.