Artist's illustration of a free-floating world called WISEA J114724.10−204021.3, thought to be an exceptionally low-mass "brown dwarf," which is a star that lacked enough mass to burn nuclear fuel and glow like a star. (NASA/JPL-Caltech)

Not all planets are lucky enough to have neighboring planets, or even a sun. Astronomers know these "lonely" free-floating planets exist in droves in our universe, but no one knows exactly how they formed or where they came from.

But astronomers have now identified a free-floating, planetary-mass object that could help shed some light on the mystery, NASA announced this week.

This sky map taken by NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) shows where the TW Hydrae family of stars is in the Hydra constellation, about 175 light-years from Earth. (NASA/JPL-Caltech)

There are at least two possibilities for how these planetary bodies come to be alone in space: either they formed there in much the same way that stars did but didn't quite have the mass to become a full-blown star, or they were planets that belonged in a solar system but were somehow ejected.

Dubbed WISEA 1147, the newly discovered, 10-million-year-old giant mass lives in the young star system, the TW Hydrae association. At least five times the mass of Jupiter, this body is too young to be a planet and doesn't have enough mass to be a star.

(MORE: NASA Finds New Planet That Could be 'Earth's Bigger, Older Cousin')

Astronomers say WISEA 1147 is a brown dwarf; it formed like a star but didn't have quite enough mass to kickstart a nuclear reaction to glow. According to ABC News,an object must have at least 100 times the mass of Jupiter to have enough mass to become a star.

"With continued monitoring, it may be possible to trace the history of WISEA 1147 to confirm whether or not it formed in isolation," Adam Schneider, lead author of a recent study that will be published in the Astrophyiscal Journal, said in a statement.

As astronomers study these planet-like objects, they'll begin to understand not just how they formed but also what they're made of and what kind of weather they have.

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