“LONELY” planets, hurled into empty space after gravitational tussles with their siblings, may be 50 per cent more common than planets orbiting stars.
Most planet searches turn up close-in worlds. But microlensing – in which a planet passes in front of a background star, temporarily magnifying its light – can find more distant ones. In two years of hunting for such signals, of Osaka University in Japan and colleagues found 10 objects of about Jupiter’s mass that did not seem to have host stars.
The team says that this and other microlensing studies suggest that more planets may be kicked…
