The monster black hole at the center of our galaxy is shooting out “spitballs” the size of planets—and one may be sprinting through space several hundred light-years away from Earth.

It seems a somewhat odd phenomenon, given the prevailing idea that black holes tend to slurp things up rather than fling stuff out. But new simulations from Harvard University undergraduate Eden Girma, presented January 4 at the American Astronomical Society’s annual meeting in Texas, suggest that our galaxy’s massive black hole could be responsible for sending an astronomical amount of these free-floating objects zipping through space.

“Our galaxy could be populated by hundreds of millions of these cold fragments that are the direct remnants of stars,” Girma says.

Those rogue, planet-like bodies