Rogue Planet Find Makes Astronomers Ponder TheoryEighteen rogue planets that seem to have broken all the rules about being born from a central, controlling sun may force a rethink about how planets form, astronomers said on Thursday... "The formation of young, free-floating, planetary-mass objects like these is difficult to explain by our current models of how planets form," Zapatero-Osorio said... They are not linked to one another in an orbit, but do move together as a cluster, she said... Many stars in our own galaxy, the Milky Way, may have formed in a similar manner to the Orion stars, she said. So there could be similar, hard-to-see planets floating around free near the Solar System.
by Maggie Fox
October 5, 2000
What got me thinking about deep space wanderers was the creationist thread about a planet with a retrograde orbit. In my opinion there are only two physical likelihoods.
the planet was hit by a very large object that started it to orbiting the opposite direction of the star or it came from deep space from a direction opposite the star’s rotation and was captured. Retrograde orbits aren’t all that unusual and there is at least one moon in our solar system that orbits in a retrograde orbit around its planet.
Who knows, frozen planets between the galaxies may be the norm.