Scientists Discovered an Entire Group of Free-Floating Planets a Lot Like Earth And we're about to find a lot more. An artist's impression of a 'free-floating' planet. Interpott.nrw / Wikimedia Not every Earth-like planet gets to have a nice, warm sun. A team of scientists just found a mysterious group of "free-floating" planets that might not have any host stars whatsoever, and some of them might have masses not very different than Earth's, according to a recent stud published in the Twenty-seven 'free-floating' planets found via microlensing Data gathered in 2016 during the K2 mission phase of NASA's Kepler Space Telescope was analyzed in the study by Iain McDonald of the University of Manchester in the U.K., which is now located at the Open University. Throughout the two-month Kepler mission, the telescope monitored a crowded population of millions of stars close to the center of our Milky Way every 30 minutes, to identify gravitational microlensing events, which point to the presence of planets beyond our solar system.