Free floating - defined by not directly orbiting a star - planets are freaky things. The number that we know of is rising as scientists learn what to look for and technology improves. These things must count for a small chunk of the missing dark matter mass, but not all.

I love to keep up to date on space discoveries as what we find out there gets stranger year on year. I grew up on sci-fi books and none of them were far out enough to get near the oddities of space.

The scientists involved in the new research are calling the objects “planemos,” short for planetary mass objects that were born in the manner of stars and do not orbit normal stars.

“Now that we know of these planetary mass objects with their own little infant planetary systems, the definition of the word ‘planet’ has blurred even more,” said study leader Ray Jayawardhana from the University of Toronto.

Observations at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Chile revealed infrared radiation from the dust disks. There are no conventional photographs of the objects. The results of this and a second, related study are being presented today at the 208th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Calgary.

…

In the other study, Subhanjoy Mohanty of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and colleagues looked at another so-called planemo and found evidence for a dust disk.

The object, named 2M1207b, was discovered in 2004 and controversially hailed then as providing the first picture of an extrasolar planet.

While clearly of planetary weight, at about eight times as massive as Jupiter, 2M1207b orbits a brown dwarf. Researchers suspect both objects formed at once by condensing out of an interstellar cloud of material—exactly how binary star systems are thought to form and unlike the typical process of planet birth.

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