Exoplanets without a star: galaxy teems with lonely Jupiters
Christopher Dombrowski, writing for Ars Technica:
[T]his week astronomers are announcing a truly unique and new class of exoplanets: Jupiter sized planets that are in extremely large orbits or completely unbound from a host star altogether. And there appear to be a lot of them, as these planets seem to be more common than main sequence stars.
I really wonder what it would be like to live on a moon of one of these planets. Without a nearby star, would the planet even be illuminated in the sky? Or would it simply be a dark disk blocking out starlight.