Land of Gregs

In a late, but short post – astronomers have just found a planet having a bit of a wander away from any star system. This is important, as it reinforces the idea that there are quite a few “rogue” planets (although not as many rouge planets, as I originally spelled it) tootling along in the inter-system space of galaxies.
The big ones, are thought to coalesce in the same way solar systems do, but there are smaller ones that are ejected from their parent stars for a number of reasons from unstable orbits to collisions. As this one is 4-7 times the size of Jupiter, it could fall into either camp.
This one is only 100 light years away, which is “just ’round the corner” in astronomical terms, and quite young (20-200 million years) and warm(~700K or around 400+ degrees celcius), which tells you how much can be ascertained and derived from astronomical spectrography and mathematical modelling.
The paper can be found here.