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Rogue planets could outnumber the stars
- apotatopot 6y agoSome of the stuff being announced about space seems to me like scientists restating stuff we should've known 50 years ago. Like, our star has more than 2 planets around it. If that's the case with lots of stars, then it's obvious there would be of a higher number of planets going "rogue".
- awb 6y ago> An upcoming NASA mission could find that there are more rogue planets — planets that float in space without orbiting a sun — than there are stars in the Milky Way, a new study theorizes. I don't think we've detected a single rogue planet, so this theory would seem novel to me.
- TheGallopedHigh 6y agoIt’s difficult because they generally do not radiate EM waves or specifically visible light.
- ericbarrett 6y agoThere's at least one candidate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CFBDSIR_2149%E2%88%920403 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CFBDSIR_2149%E2%88%920403 (edit) Linked from the same article, a confirmed rogue planet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PSO_J318.5%E2%88%9222 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PSO_J318.5%E2%88%9222
- nend 6y agoWell, science doesn't really operate by assuming what the truth is. If it did it wouldn't be science. And if it's so obvious that we should've known this 50 years ago, you could've gone down in history as the scientist who discovered this truth. But instead you're complaining on the internet about other people trying to prove it.
- apotatopot 6y agoExcept I wasn't alive 50 years ago. Shows what you know, Mr. Jerk.
- nkrisc 6y agoWell now's your chance to discover what should be so obvious right now that people on the internet will dismiss it as obvious 50 years from now. So what you got?
- tachyonbeam 6y agoActually, informed guesses make a lot of sense when we have limited data. Science doesn't operate by assuming that we know nothing outside of what we have evidence for. That wouldn't be logical at all. That being said, it is of course interesting and valuable to confirm our hypotheses.
- kabdib 6y agoWe first detected exoplanets in 1992 (that was for a planet orbitig a neutron star, for one orbiting a "vanilla" star it was 1995). So until 25-30 years ago, we had NO data on the frequency of exoplanets. Exoplanet hunting really only hit its stride in the 2010s. Things have become a lot clearer in the last couple of decades. I guess it's easy to take our current knowledge for granted.
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- keithwhor 6y agoI think it's kinda cool to consider that rogue planets / brown dwarfs [0] could be candidates for extending human life beyond the solar system post-Sol. Assuming we have enough fissile material (or master cold fusion) to perpetuate the civilization's energy requirements, we could explore the stars in darkness for eons. I'm not sure how likely they are as candidates for life to emerge spontaneously, it seems like there's a very high energy input requirement over billions of years (Sol -> Earth) to get anything close to human civilization... but it's cool to think that, perhaps, some future humans could settle a planet eternally cloaked in darkness. Adapt to the reality of that planet over generations... and be unable to acclimate to life near stars at all. Also, post-Andromeda collision, is this a necessary future for posthuman life? [1] Billions of cold worlds will be flung into the far reaches of the Universe. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_dwarf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_dwarf [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andromeda%E2%80%93Milky_Way_collision https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andromeda%E2%80%93Milky_Way_co...
- sgt 6y agoAgree that would be very exciting. However, I think one has to consider maneuverability of the planet, effectively making into it a very large spaceship. It won't exactly turn on a dime, but it's crucial to alter its heading in some way, at the very least to avoid getting caught up in the gravitational orbit of another star. I wonder about the energy requirements for something like that, while still having enough to make it a safe place to live with a magnetosphere etc.
- ncmncm 6y agoIt is generally quite difficult to get "caught" in orbit. You start out with enough energy to leave again. Big planets catch asteroids as moons only after millions of passes, generally involving interaction with another moon to steal some energy.
- Causality1 6y agoIf you can generate enough energy to move a planet you'd have a far easier time just making a starship big enough for your whole species. The entire biosphere of earth occupies the volume equivalent of the skin on an apple. Just accelerating earth to solar escape velocity would take 3E24 joules.
- database_lost 6y agoMaybe someone with more knowledge on the subject could answer, but could a much larger than expected number of such bodies partially explain Dark Matter?
- jetru 6y agoYES! None of these news articles seem to address this important question. Edit: I meant "yes, someone with more knowledge please answer this question". Not "yes, it could be dark matter"
- dnautics 6y agoMACHOs where eliminated as an unlikely consideration a long time ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massive_compact_halo_object https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massive_compact_halo_object (that doesn't mean it's categorically wrong, just decided to be so unlikely to be correct that it's not worth our time)
- ivalm 6y agoProbably not since dark matter tends to not radiate even when accreating next to galactic nucleus/pretty extreme conditions. This is in part why dark matter is less clustered than normal baryonic matter (nothing to shave off angular momentum). If it was planets they would heat up in the accretion disk, radiate light, decay orbit, and fall into the black hole.
- hinkley 6y agoIn addition to the behaviors mentioned by others, even if this doubles the amount of “normal matter” in the universe, that still leaves us with an explanation for less than 10% of the stuff we can see.
- skohan 6y agoDoes this also account for smaller objects we haven't observed yet? Like I have often wondered if deep space is full of everything between gas giants and specs of dust, how dense would it have to be to account for the missing mass
- m3kw9 6y agoMore likely these planets harbour super advanced life as the don’t need to depend on an external energy source, exposed to planetary event risk, and can control their own fate. Maybe they can even change trajectory given their advancement
- qayxc 6y agoI'm afraid that doesn't follow at all. Life requires an energy source and the only energy sources a rouge planet has, are leftover heat from its formation process and nuclear decay. The energy released by geological processes is too localised and too little to allow for widespread higher lifeforms. Even the comparatively active Earth doesn't generate enough heat on its own to keep its oceans liquid (e.g. 100mW/m² at the oceanic crust and <70mW/m² at the continental crust) or a gaseous atmosphere of any kind. In order to generate enough heat to keep a liquid ocean and an atmosphere (both are required for higher lifeforms as of our current understanding), the planemo needs to be quite large or have at least one big moon in a close orbit. The first case is very likely to generate an ice giant like Neptune or Uranus, both highly unlikely to harbour any kind of life. The second case is probably very rare - the event that led to the ejection of the planet would've also affected any moons. In addition, close orbits either rapidly decay (see Deimos on Mars) with the moon crashing onto the surface within just a few million years; or they recede over time due to the exchange of angular momentum between the two bodies (see our Moon). In conclusion, while planemos may indeed harbour microbial life in the form of extremophiles living in their crust, any multicellular life is very unlikely to have survived the ejection event and subsequent loss of a host star. Formation of life on a free floating planet is very improbable and "super advanced" life requires stable conditions over billions of years and sufficient energy, which simply isn't available for the reasons mentioned above. Feel free to correct me if I got something wrong, though.
- m3kw9 6y agoIf they are advanced enough, they would have even better methods than nuclear or fission power. More advanced methods of energy generation.
- mromanuk 6y agoIf humanity is still around in a few hundred million years, they could use the earth as the vessel to escape the sun before it devour us. https://www.space.com/22471-red-giant-stars.html https://www.space.com/22471-red-giant-stars.html
- ISL 6y agoFrom a numeric standpoint, this seems like a reasonable conclusion. For the system we know well, there are eight times as many planets as there are stars. A lot of systems in which exoplanets have been observed are known to have more than one planet. The only way this is unlikely to be the case is if planets remain strongly-bound to stars.
- hliyan 6y agoAlso from an intuition / thought experiment standpoint: stars form through coalescing mass. Only a subset of such coalescing masses reach the special conditions needed for fusion ignition. It follows that the general case is that of masses that fall short of that threshold.
- dreamcompiler 6y agoIt seems to be the case that most gravitationally-significant bodies sustain a planar ring system, and that over time the matter in the ring coalesces into moons. Earth is but a pebble in the Sun's ring.
- sxp 6y ago> Johnson said these planets are not likely to support life. "They would probably be extremely cold, because they have no star," he said. (Other research missions involving Ohio State astronomers will search for exoplanets that could host life.) This depends on the nature of the planet. Some planets with internal heat sources like Earth or Jupiter wouldn't be frozen. They wouldn't have liquid water on their surface, but they might have warm and habitable conditions somewhere in the planet for certain definitions of "habitable". Passages in the Void is a set of stories from Kuro5hin where I first read about rogue planets sustaining life: http://localroger.com/ http://localroger.com/ They were written by the same author as Metamorphosis of the Prime Intellect and are interesting sci-fi.
- dreamcompiler 6y agoThanks. I was just about to ask if there was any good sci-fi about civilizations living on the internal heat of a rogue planet.
- sbierwagen 6y agoFor the confused: Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope was formerly the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope. They renamed it in May.
- optimalsolver 6y agoThe general Bel Riose had his military headquarters on one of these things in Asimov's Foundation and Empire.
- fernly 6y agoIt's a bit boggling that they plan to find "rogue" planets by "microlensing"[2]. To quote from [1] > The mission will stare at the a dense star region toward the direction of the center of our Milky Way galaxy to observe microlensing events. So you have a series of images of a field full of thousands (tens of thousands?) of stars, and you ("you" meaning "a great honking bunch of computer logic") compare one image to the next looking for _one_ of the stars to have briefly doubled, or turned into a little ring. And then you derive a lot of info from that brief distortion event. [1] https://roman.gsfc.nasa.gov/faq.html https://roman.gsfc.nasa.gov/faq.html [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_microlensing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_microlensing