Hubble Finds Wandering Planetoids

Posted by michael on Thursday June 28, 2001 @04:43AM from the that's-no-moon,-it's-a-space-station dept.

Canuckanuck writes: "The Space Telescope Institute which operates the Hubble Telecope has this story about the discovery of an unexpected hereto unknown population of wandering, planet-sized objects in the outer Milky Way that could be 80 times less massive than our beloved Earth. The viewing took place in M22 (a globular cluster) by way of microlensing. These things could be the smallest bodies ever seen beyond our solar system, which don't orbit a star. More information can be seen at JPL's website."

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Correction... by RareHeintz · 2001-06-28 01:32 · Score: 3

That's 80 times as massive as Earth, not 80 times as massive. The other mass comparison was ~.25 the mass of Jupiter.
If the objects were 1/80 of the mass of the Earth - that's pretty much asteroid-sized - I doubt they could have been detected as microlensing events.
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