Science Daily Magazine has an article about there being a lot more free floating planets in our galaxy than there are stars. I don't know about that, it is certainly possible that a lot of planets are out there.
Ethan Siegel in his "Starts With A Bang" blog has a post about how Jupiter size planets that form close to their parent stars will throw smaller planets out of that solar system. So there can be a huge number of free-floating planets out there.
Where I have a problem with the article is that the researchers who wrote the paper that is being reported on say that lots of those planets are life bearing. That rings alarm bells for me. First off, they say that these planets formed in the early universe, when it was only a few million years old. I'm not sure how life would have formed at that early age, since the concentration of heavier elements would have been much lower than it is now. The other problem is that I'm not sure how life would have formed at the low temperatures free floating planets would encounter.
Bill Gill
