Illustration by Luis G. Rendon/The Daily Beast
Brightly lit planets orbiting around blazing suns, with asteroids sprinkled between them and a few comets passing by—that’s the popular conception of how our galaxy looks. Stars are the main characters in the story of the universe, and everything else is just part of the supporting cast.
It’s also wrong. In the vast, dark, cold distances between stars, there are planets that apparently broke free of their host star’s gravity, or lingered on as brown dwarf stars after misfiring in their own attempts to become stars. These “rogue” bodies float freely in the void—uncounted, unscrutinized and, in most cases, unseen.
“Free-floating planets are literally wanderers among the stars of the Milky Way,” Alexander Scholz, an astronomer at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, told The Daily Beast.