Now... What if the gas giants are the result of ejections from the sun's mass during the sun's early formation. Say the proto-star was spinning too quickly and didn't have the mass and thus gravitational pull to maintain its shape, it wobbled, it spun off balls of protogas, and spit them out in arcs, of which some managed to fall into stable orbits, while others escaped the solar system entirely, and still others eventually fell back into the sun.
If this is the case, the universe is probably filled with trillions of gas giants just floating between the stars.
Heh. :') Or perhaps the heliocentric universe is finally dying off.
Planets in all the wrong places
The Christian Science Monitor | 03/06/06 | Michelle Thaller
Posted on 03/06/2006 8:16:39 PM EST by KevinDavis
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1591313/posts
Rogue Planet Find Makes Astronomers Ponder TheoryEighteen rogue planets that seem to have broken all the rules about being born from a central, controlling sun may force a rethink about how planets form, astronomers said on Thursday... "The formation of young, free-floating, planetary-mass objects like these is difficult to explain by our current models of how planets form," Zapatero-Osorio said... They are not linked to one another in an orbit, but do move together as a cluster, she said... Many stars in our own galaxy, the Milky Way, may have formed in a similar manner to the Orion stars, she said. So there could be similar, hard-to-see planets floating around free near the Solar System.
by Maggie Fox
October 5, 2000