#freefloatingplanets — Public Fediverse posts

Free Floating or Merely Detached? https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/ae6508 -> "Microlensing surveys suggest the presence of a surprisingly large population of free-floating planets, with a rate of about two Neptunes per star. The origin of such objects is not known, neither do we know if they are truly unbound or are merely orbiting at large separations from their host stars. [...] Under the hypothesis that planet–planet scattering is the dominant source of #FreeFloatingPlanets, we estimate that about one-half of the reported 'free-floating' Neptunes are not free but merely 'detached'" -> Detached but Not Alone: https://aasnova.org/2026/06/26/detached-but-not-alone/

A free-floating-planet microlensing event caused by a Saturn-mass object: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00057 -> #FreeFloatingPlanets – lonely wanderers in the Milky Way: https://en.uw.edu.pl/free-floating-planets-lonely-wanderers-in-the-milky-way/

Our intention was to use the #Kepler mini-survey to find #FreeFloatingPlanets (#FFP). FFPs are #planets that are alone in deep space. Remarkably, there was already some tentative evidence for such planets. Perhaps they formed like #stars out of gas by themselves, or perhaps they were ejected from their #planetary system. We need data to get the answers. Indeed our work uncovered 5 new candidates, 4 of which are consistent with #Earth mass FFPs. https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stab1377 (7/n)