The discovery was made by an international team of EU-funded researchers conducting a planetary microlensing survey of the Milky Way galaxy. This implies implies that there could be billions more free-floating Jupiter-style planets floating in interstellar space far from the light of any nearby parent star. Although scientists supposed floating planets existed, due to their distant location, 10,000 to 20,000 light-years away from Earth, the planets had gone undetected until now.

The study, carried out by astronomers from Chile, Japan, New Zealand, Poland, the United Kingdom and the United States, was funded in part by the OGLE-IV (Optical gravitational lensing experiment: new frontiers in observational astronomy ') project, which received a European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant worth €2.5 million under the 'Ideas' Thematic area of the EU's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7).

This is the fourth phase of the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment (OGLE) project, one of the largest scale sky-surveys worldwide, which has been operative since 1992. OGLE has contributed so far to many fields of modern astrophysics including gravitational microlensing, extrasolar planets searches, stellar astrophysics, and Galactic structure. The OGLE-IV survey also contributes to the search for Pluto-size dwarf planets from the Kuiper Belt, the search for free-floating black holes, and microlensing in the Magellanic Clouds and Galactic disk.

Researchers analysed the central area of the Milky Way, or 'Galactic Bulge', and gathered data using the 1.8-metre-wide Microlensing Observations in Astrophysics (MOA) telescope in New Zealand, which scanned the stars at the centre of our Galaxy for gravitational microlensing events every hour during two years. Without this special microlensing telescope, the research would have been impossible as this part of space is only visible using this technique. The scientists also suggests that these lonesome planets were probably ejected from developing planetary systems.