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Are there planets hurtling through interstellar or even intergalactic space?
by hughw 3y ago
Are there planets hurtling through interstellar or even intergalactic space?
- aaomidi 3y agoIt’s nearly impossible to see them. There’s no light.
- hughw 3y agoRight. They might occlude a star though.
- PaulHoule 3y agoOr gravitationally lens a star, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MACHO_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MACHO_Project
- jjk166 3y agoOnly for the brief period of time they happen to be in line with it. For orbiting planets, we can see these occlusions happening multiple times and thus filter them out from the noise, but there are countless reasons the light from a star could briefly dim once. We can find bodies within the solar system as they'll occlude multiple stars in a row as they move along, but for rogue planets to move far enough across the sky to occlude another star would take millennia.
- krapp 3y agoYes, they're called rogue planets[0]. There are also rogue stars[1]. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue_planet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue_planet [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intergalactic_star https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intergalactic_star
- hughw 3y agoHoly smoke, there's a lot of them.
- hprotagonist 3y agowell, there’s a lot of everything.