The most detailed infrared map of the Milky Way contains incredible images ... stellar-mass black holes and six free-floating "rogue planets," that aren't orbiting parent stars.

This collage highlights a small selection of regions of the Milky Way imaged as part of the most ... called brown dwarfs and free-floating planets that don’t orbit a star.

The Milky Way is estimated to have anywhere from 100 billion to 400 billion stars and likely as many planets. At 1.5 billion objects, the map represents only a small slice of the galaxy.

Image: ESA/Gaia/DPAC, Stefan Payne-Wardenaar The European Space Agency’s Gaia mission has completed one of its major charges: delivering a map of the Milky Way galaxy, comprised of trillions of ...

Our solar system resides in a galaxy called the Milky Way, stuffed with between 100 billion and 400 billion other stars, many of them with planets of their own. The Milky Way got its name from the ...

The Gaia mission, launched by the European Space Agency, has completed a decade of groundbreaking astronomical observations, collecting over three trillion data points on two billion stars and ...