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More than 500 exoplanets have been detected in just over a decade of hunting by scientists and the vast majority of these are gravitationally bound to a star, orbiting it in the way the planets in the solar system orbit the Sun. Free-floating planets have been reported before but only in regions of space where stars are already forming.

The latest discovery shows that free-floating planets exist in large numbers in the emptiest parts of space, with no stars within a distance at least 10 times that between the Sun and the Earth. Bennett estimated that there are around 1.8 times as many of these free-floating Jupiter-sized giant planets as there are stars in the galaxy. "That's a bit more than people had expected," he said.

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