Microlensing planets

The image with the article is deceptive:. It shows blobs around a center, and you want to hope, "are those actual images of extragalactic planets?" Unfortunately, no--those are images of quasars, and the microlensing effects not the image but the spectrum of light:

We show that a population of unbound planets between stars with masses ranging from Moon to Jupiter masses is needed to explain the frequent Fe Kα line energy shifts observed in the gravitationally lensed quasar RXJ 1131–1231 at a lens redshift of z = 0.295 or 3.8 billion lt-yr away. We constrain the planet mass-fraction to be larger than 0.0001 of the halo mass, which is equivalent to 2000 objects ranging from Moon to Jupiter mass per main-sequence star.

To make up for that disappointment, notice the word "unbound" in the quote above. They think they have detected, though not seen, a multitude of planets between stars. REAL planets.