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'Lonely' Rogue Planet Discovered Wandering the Milky Way

Astronomers have discovered a free-floating planet, not associated with any parent star wandering our galaxy.

Rogue Planets Could Outnumber Stars in the Milky Way

We might have to revise the commonly accepted image of planets orbiting a parent star.

Lonely planet is actually part of the largest planetary system in the Milky Way

Astronomers find the parent of an orphan planet. The finding makes the solar system the biggest in the galaxy.

70,000 Years Ago, a Rogue Star Passed Through Our Solar System

Too close for comfort – a team of astronomers from the US, Europe, Chile and South Africa concluded that a dim star passed through the Oort cloud, our solar system’s distant cloud of comets. The star missed the Earth by less than one light year, and passed five times closer than the current closest star, Proxima […]

A strange, lonely planet found without a star

An international discovered a young, exotic, rogue planet – PSO J318.5-22, is just 80 light-years away from Earth and has a mass six times that of Jupiter; it was formed apporximately 12 million years ago – which makes it a newborn in terms of planets (the Earth was formed approximately 4.5 billion years ago. “We […]

"Eye of Sauron" star hosts rogue planet

Back in 2008, Hubble released a stunning image of a very bright star called Fomalhaut which spanned a huge disk of matter around it. The whole picture bared an uncanny resemblance to the eye of Sauron from the Lord of the Rings movies. Also at the time, scientists caught the glimpse of a tiny speck of light […]

Closest rogue planet discovered is just 100 light-years away

Like in a scene from a Sci-fi novel, about 100 light years away, somewhere in the constellation Doradus, a planet is travelling around the galaxy by itself, without orbiting a parent star. This “rogue planet“, has a temperature of about 400C and a mass between 4 to 7 times that of Jupiter – close to […]

Stars capture and swap with one another nomad planets

Some time ago we told you about one of the most fascinating facts this blog has ever published, namely how there are “nomad” or “rogue” planets outside our solar system, which travel aimlessly through interstellar space without having to circle a certain star. It’s estimated that there are actually more such nomad planets haunting through […]

Nomad planets may litter Milky Way

According to a recent study published by researchers from the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology (KIPAC), our galaxy may be ‘infested’ with nomad planets, which wander aimlessly instead of orbiting a star. Furthermore, the study concluded there may actually be 100,000 times more “nomad planets” in the Milky Way than stars. If this […]