Astronomer David Bennett and his colleagues at the University of Notre Dame (USA) have discovered a new type of planets . They are dark bodies, with a mass similar to Jupiter, that float isolated in space , away from any hot stars. The researchers, publishing their finding in the journal Nature , suspect that these planets were expelled from developing solar systems.
The discovery has been made possible by observing a region in the center of the Milky Way . The analyzes show ten isolated planets, which indicates not only that these types of planets exist but that they could be much more common than previously thought. Specifically, Bennett postulates that in the universe there could be twice as many "lonely" planets as there are stars . Of course, they would be less numerous than planets like Earth, which orbit around a star.
The survey echoed by Nature does not take into account isolated planets less massive than Jupiter or Saturn, although astronomers suspect that they could be even more frequent, and even harbor life. NASA's WFIRST mission, currently scheduled to launch in 2018, will use a technique called "microlensing" to search for floating Earth-like planets in our galaxy.
