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Astronomers of University of Warsaw at Poland has identified two "rogue planets" in our galaxy that do not revolve around a star. Unlike the vast majority of discovered planets, these rogue planets drift in space alone, without sunlight to illuminate them.
The debate has raged for years in astronomical circles over whether unreliable planets could exist. Since they do not have stars to light them, they are extremely hard to find because they are almost always in the dark. However, a technique called gravitational microlens has allowed researchers to identify unreliable planets by observing when a planet is located between a distant star and the Earth. When this happens, the planet acts as a lens, distorting the light we can see from that star when it reaches the Earth. This indicates that a massive body like a planet passes in front of the star and that body size can be estimated from the size of the distortion.
The two sighted planets discovered are called OGLE-2017-BLG-0560 and OGLE-2012-BLG-1323, named after the OGLE investigation (Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment) that discovered them. The first detected planet, OGLE-2017-BLG-0560, was detected in April 2017 and could be one to twenty times the mass of Jupiter. The discovery of evidence from this planet has prompted scientists to reread their old research data in search of similar evidence. It was thus that they discovered the smallest OGLE-2012-BLG-1323, located between Neptune and Earth, which had been captured for the first time in August 2012. The results were published in the archives of the pre-print magazine arXiv.
This makes the planets two of the very few rogue planets identified so far. The reason researchers can not be certain of the exact size of each planet is that they can not know how far away the planets are from the Earth. As a result, the planets could be larger and farther away or smaller and closer together and produce the same gravitational effect on the light of distant stars.
Even though they are hard to spot, some astronomers predict that rogue planets are not uncommon in our galaxy. Neil DeGrasse Tyson hypothesized that there could be billions of unreliable planets in the cold of space, created during chaotic births of solar systems and thrown into space .
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