Astronomers just spotted a planet floating freely in space without a star

[Mike Wehner]

• Scientists have used gravitational lensing to detect a so-called 'rogue planet' that doesn't orbit a star and floats freely in space.
• The planet is relatively small, but researchers can't tell for certain how far away it is from Earth.
• It's possible that the Milky Way is home to trillions of these free planets.

We think of our solar system as typical, or even "normal," but in the universe, there's really no such thing as normal. So many circumstances exist with regard to planets, stars, moons, and other objects that there's no clear arrangement that the cosmos favors over any other, and there are even free-floating "rogue planets" that have escaped the systems they developed in and are just sort of doing their own thing.

A new discovery of one such rogue planet was just described in a lengthy research paper. The planet was spotted by two teams, one working with OGLE, the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment, and KMTN, the Korean Microlensing Telescope Network. The only problem? Nobody really knows how far away the mysterious planet is.

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Astronomers just spotted a planet floating freely in space without a star originally appeared on BGR.com on Mon, 5 Oct 2020 at 21:18:20 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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