Space is littered with cosmic wanderers. Some are stars booted from the grip of a companion they once had. Others are rogue comets and asteroids on runaway trajectories with nowhere to go and no one chasing them. We typically call those interstellar objects. Then there are mysterious fragments booted from their solar system by the explosive culmination of their stars’ lives. That’s what Garrett Levine at Yale University is looking for.

"At the end of a star's lifetime, it's losing mass, and everything's going haywire in its system," Levine tells Inverse. "Some stuff might fall onto the star, and some might leave the system, and it's the latter we're looking at."

These fragments are called jurads (named for the late astronomer Michael Jura), and short of using god-like powers to shatter a planet light years away and peer inside, they’re the best way to get even a glimpse of how planets form in distant star systems, and if they’re chemically like any of the planets in our Solar System. To find these jurads, Levine and his colleagues are using one of the most ambitious projects in astronomy: the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST).

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