This could be a groundbreaking discovery, with astronomers at the University of Warsaw in Poland finding two lonely "ghost" planets in the Milky Way, wandering in the dark, cold interstellar space, meaning that there may be even more free planets floating in the Milky Way than stars, a hilarious and mysterious ghost planetary world that we have never known before.
We already know that there may be hundreds of billions of stars in the Milky Way, but only a few thousand planets have been discovered so far, and thanks to observations from the recently dead Kepler telescope in recent years. This is because the planets themselves do not emit light, and we can only discover the planets around the star by the transit method, that is, the brightness of the star changes as the planet passes in front of the star, and the ghost planets wandering in the Milky Way cannot be detected because they do not orbit the star.
Scientists have speculated that there may be wandering ghost planets in the Milky Way, but it is difficult to find evidence of their existence. Astronomers at the University of Warsaw have used gravitational microlensing technology, in which distant starlight is bent by the planet's gravitational pull as it passes through it, allowing the planet's existence to be detected. With this technique, researchers have recently discovered two mysterious ghost planets, however, because the evidence is so circumstantial that scientists have had difficulty determining the size of the planets, they can only estimate that one is about 2 to 20 times that of Jupiter, and one is 2.3 to 23 times that of Earth.
Ghost planets in the Milky Way are thought to have catapulted out of various star systems, and researchers believe that planet formation theories support that such planets are more common than stars in the Milky Way. If this is the case, it means that what we think of as empty interstellar space may actually be more crowded, with countless rocky worlds like our earth, but because there is no star's light illuminating, these invisible mysterious ghost worlds are likely to be completely dark and cold. As for whether they can support the existence of life, at least on their surface, it is impossible for us to survive such a life, but who can say clearly under them? Who can guarantee that there will be no thriving underground civilization in the many ghost worlds of the Galaxy?
If there really is a more advanced intelligent civilization in the universe than us, they can completely transform such ghost planets, ride them to interstellar space, meet the right star of their choice, and stop and start a new life. After the development of our earth civilization to a certain extent, we can also take such a planet and spread the seeds of civilization to distant interstellar space.
The study was published last week on the preprint server ArXiv.