Popular Mechanics takes a look at the loneliest planets in the universe – the ones that drift around without a star to orbit:
The researchers, led by David Bennett of the University of Notre Dame, surveyed a place in the Milky Way called the Galactic Bulge where they spotted these drifting Jupiters. “It basically reveals a set of planets that weren’t really known before,” Bennett says.
But, he says, the most surprising part is the broader implication about the galaxy. Based on the wanderers they found, Bennett and colleagues suggest that the Milky Way could be littered with orphan planets. There could be one, maybe even two, free-floating planets for every star in the galaxy, a huge population destined to wander the galaxy alone for billions of years.
“I might have guessed half as many,” Bennett says. And Sara Seager, an MIT professor who studies the atmospheres of exoplanets but who was not part of this study, agrees that the potential multitude is a stunner. “Who knew there were so many planets out there?” she says.