Rogue planets wander through space without orbiting a star, and now scientists have found two more of these free-floating worlds.
Przemek Mróz, a PhD student at the Astronomical Observatory of the University of Warsaw, led the research, which pinpointed two free-floating planets.
ALSO READ: NASA’s podcast to Mars; take a look at the flight to the Red Planet
The planets are officially called OGLE-2017-BLG-0560 and OGLE-2012-BLG-1323, they are named after the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment (OGLE), an astronomical survey operated from Las Campanas Observatory in Chile, which flags the gravitational fingerprints of rogue planets.
The team calculated that rogue planets might even be more common than stars in the Milky Way, even though only 10 have been discovered so far.
ALSO READ: NASA finds your ‘ice doodle’ in Antarctica!
Mróz and his colleagues spotted one of the worlds behaving like a lens. The team can’t be sure how big these planets are because they have not been able to precisely measure how far they are away — the mass estimates are based on locations either in the main disk of the galaxy or the more distant bulge around the Milky Way’s centre.
Click here for Latest News updates and viral videos on our AI-powered smart news genie