Rogue planets! Scientists detect Jupiter-sized roamers inside the Milky Way
Artist’s concept showing free-floating planet that has roughly the mass of Jupiter. Sumi et al. show that these lone worlds, perhaps ejected from the planetary systems of their birth, are probably more common in our galaxy than stars.
The bitterly fought Pluto wars of a few years back showed that even the experts disagree on what is and what isn’t a planet. One thing there’s no quarrel about, of course: a planet is, by definition, something that orbits a star.
Except, it turns out, when it isn’t. Writing in the latest issue of Nature, a team of astronomers is reporting the discovery of ten objects roughly the size of Jupiter that seem to be on the loose, roaming the galaxy untethered to any star. And while ten seems like an insignificant number in a galaxy packed with 200 billion or more stars, the search was an extremely limited one. Unless the observers happened to be absurdly lucky, there could actually be a lot more of these rogue Jupiters perhaps twice as many stars as there are in the Milky Way.
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