A Dark Matter Subpopulation?
Say there were 1,000 rogue planets per star in the Milky Way galaxy. That would amount to 1,000 x 400 billion stars = 400 trillion rogue planets.
If Suni et al (Nature, 2011) are correct that the mass of the typical rogue planet is on the order of the mass of Jupiter (~0.001 solar mass), then we are talking about the MWG containing 0.4 trillion solar mass in the form of rogue planets that were unknown before 2011.
If my math is correct, then wouldn’t that be an appreciable fraction of the enigmatic mass attributed to the dark matter in the MWG?
It would seem like narrowing the estimated range of 100 to 100,000 rogue planets per star to at least a reasonably accurate order of magnitude would be a very high priority astrophysical goal.