Free-floating Planets Outnumber Stars, Represent Possible Life Sites

Free-floating Planets Outnumber Stars, Represent Possible Life Sites

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Life-bearing planets may exist in vast numbers in the space between stars in our Milky Way galaxy. An international team of researchers argue a few hundred thousand billion free-floating Earth-sized planets may exist in the space between stars. Writing in the journal Astrophysics and Space Science, they propose the planets originated in the early universe within a few million years of the big bang and make up most of the so-called missing mass of galaxies. Around 750 exoplanets have been discovered since 1995, but all are planets orbiting stars, and very few, if any, have been deemed potential candidates for life, the researchers said. Earlier studies in which the effects of gravitational “lensing” suggest the possibility of a much larger number of planets in our galaxy, they said. Such planetary bodies could have crossed our inner solar system every 25 million years or so and during each transit picked up dust with components of the solar system’s living cells, the scientists propose.