LOS ANGELES — The Milky Way galaxy may be filled with millions upon millions of Jupiter-sized planets that have escaped their solar systems and are wandering freely in space, an international team of researchers said Wednesday in a finding that should make astronomers rethink their ideas about planetary formation.
While scientists had previously thought that about 20 percent of stars had massive planets attached to them, the new results reported in the journal Nature suggest that there are at least twice as many planets as stars, and perhaps several times as many.
The finding “is a revelation in the sense that it looks like a quintupling of the number of gas giants in the universe,” said astronomer Alan Boss of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, who was not involved in the research. Los Angeles Times
