Free-Floating Planets — British Team Restakes Its Claim. “An academic tug-of-war over worlds beyond our solar system continued Tuesday, with two British
scientists reasserting their claim to have found free-floating planets that others say are nothing of
the sort.” Departing from the commonly-understood concept of a planet as an object orbiting a star, the argument here is that measurements of these objects — in the Trapezium Cluster of the Orion Nebula — qualify them as planets because they are “sub 13Mjup”, i.e. less than 13 times the mass of Jupiter. Nothing smaller has sufficient temperature and pressure in its core to support fusion. The counterargument is that the calculations are off and that these objects are really more massive brown dwarf stars, “unattached balls of gas.”