A rogue planet is a planet not orbiting a star and thus not being part of a solar system. However, such planets might support life due to geologic activities. The Founders’ homeworld in the Omarion Nebula was such a planet, as was Dakala and Trelane’s planet of Gothos. (ENT: “Rogue Planet”; DS9: “The Search, Part I”; TOS: “The Squire of Gothos”).
Rogue planets do actually exist in the universe. A rogue planet is an object which has equivalent mass to a planet and is not gravitationally bound to any star, and that therefore moves through space as an independent object. Several astronomers claim to have detected such objects (for example, Cha 110913-773444), but those detections remain unconfirmed.
Astronomers have used the Herschel Space Observatory and the Very Large Telescope to observe a very young free-floating planetary-mass object, OTS 44, and demonstrate that the processes characterizing the canonical star-like mode of formation apply to isolated objects down to a few Jupiter masses. Herschel far-infrared observations have shown that OTS 44 is surrounded by a disk of at least 10 Earth masses and thus could eventually form a mini planetary system. Spectroscopic observations of OTS 44 with the SINFONI spectrograph at the Very Large Telescope have revealed that the disk is actively accreting matter, similarly to the disks of young stars. In December 2013, a candidate exomoon of a rogue planet was announced.
In October 2020, OGLE-2016-BLG-1928, an Earth-mass rogue planet, was discovered in the Milky Way.
Picture Credit : Google