Our daily universe: drifter planets

This article from The New York Times suggests that billions of planets are wandering through the universe either wholly unattached from a star or very distantly orbiting a star like our Sun. The implications?

Planetary astronomers say the results will allow them to tap into a whole new unsuspected realm of exoplanets — as planets outside our own solar system are called — causing scientists to re-evaluate how many there are, where they are and how they are created, even as astronomers immediately begin to ponder whether the new planets in question are in fact floating free or are just far from their stars, at distances comparable to those of Uranus and Neptune in our own solar system. ((http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/19/science/space/19planets.html?ref=science))

Here is an artist’s rendering:

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/R. Hurt - An artist's rendering of an isolated planet.