[QUOTE][I]Free-floating planets may be more common in our Galaxy than stars.
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[IMG]http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-fv0FExJyIWM/TdQTORJsB_I/AAAAAAAALfs/NdM3UsltYhA/s1600/lonelyplanets.jpg[/IMG]
BBC News - Japanese astronomers claim to have found free-floating "planets" which do not seem to orbit a star. They say they have found 10 Jupiter-sized objects which they could not connect to any solar system. They also believe such objects could be as common as stars are throughout the Milky Way. Using a technique called gravitational microlensing, they detected 10 Jupiter-mass planets wandering far from light-giving stars. Then they estimated the total number of such rogue planets, based on detection efficiency, microlensing-event probability and the relative rate of lensing caused by stars or planets. They concluded that there could be as many as 400 billion of these wandering planets, far outnumbering main-sequence stars such as our Sun
Nature - Unbound or distant planetary mass population detected by gravitational microlensing
Nature - So many lonely planets with no star to guide them
Scattered about the Milky Way are floating, Jupiter-mass objects, which are likely to be planets wandering around the Galaxy's core instead of orbiting host stars. But these planets aren't rare occurrences in the interstellar sea: the drifters might be nearly twice as numerous as the most common stars.
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Planetary scientist David Stevenson at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena has considered how the temperatures on ejected planets might compare with those on star-bound bodies2. If Jupiter were kicked out of the Solar System, its surface temperature would drop by only about 15 kelvin, he says – although it would still be unsuitable for supporting life. However, "when you eject a planet that is quite massive, it could have carried along an orbiting body", Stevenson adds. "And that might be a more attractive possibility for life."
Unbound Earth-mass planets might still be capable of carrying liquid water, Stevenson says, even in the frozen reaches of interstellar space – as long as they have a heat-trapping hydrogen atmosphere. "That can bring the surface temperature up to 300 kelvin [about 27 °C]," he says. "And then you can have oceans."
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Since 1995, more than 500 exoplanets have been detected using different techniques of which 12 were detected with gravitational microlensing. Most of these are gravitationally bound to their host stars. There is some evidence of free-floating planetary-mass objects in young star-forming regions but these objects are limited to massive objects of 3 to 15 Jupiter masses with large uncertainties in photometric mass estimates and their abundance. Here, we report the discovery of a population of unbound or distant Jupiter-mass objects, which are almost twice as common as main-sequence stars, based on two years of gravitational microlensing survey observations towards the Galactic Bulge. These planetary-mass objects have no host stars that can be detected within about ten astronomical units by gravitational microlensing. However, a comparison with constraints from direct imaging suggests that most of these planetary-mass objects are not bound to any host star. An abrupt change in the mass function at about one Jupiter mass favours the idea that their formation process is different from that of stars and brown dwarfs. They may have formed in proto-planetary disks and subsequently scattered into unbound or very distant orbits.
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[URL=http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v473/n7347/extref/nature10092-s1.pdf]35 pages of supplemental information[/URL]
[URL=http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v473/n7347/full/473289a.html]Nature - Astronomy: Bound and unbound planets abound[/URL]
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Two teams searching for extrasolar planets have jointly discovered a new population of objects: ten Jupiter-mass planets far from their host stars, or perhaps even floating freely through the Milky Way.
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Source: [url]http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/05/400-billion-wandering-planets-in-milky.html[/url]
Thats cool, it would be so interesting to find a wandering planet that had a complete civilization millions of years ago, but is now dead.
Also Resources!
[QUOTE=DesolateGrun;29912335]Thats cool, it would be so interesting to find a wandering planet that had a complete civilization millions of years ago, but is now dead.
Also Resources![/QUOTE]
Couldn't life still thrive on one of these "wandering planets" underground if there was water and sufficient heat
Just the idea of those things is so mysterious and fascinating. Too bad they're probably all gigantic hunks of ice.
[editline]asd[/editline]
Why the disagrees? Any planet without a parent star or other source of heat, especially one in the middle of nowhere in space, would be downright frigid.
Wandering planets sound cool. If they had a colony on them, i'd say this and only this:
[media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8WZW4groJro[/media]
I wonder if when the world ends in 2012 it will be because a wandering planet hits Earth.
Bah, Nibiru's just an old Sumerian fairy tale, used to scare the children. We'll see no rogue worlds for aeons yet, at least not until some dumbass blows up a nuclear waste dump on the Moon.
Wandering planets... that's interesting, because the word "planet" comes from the greek "αστήρ" - which means wandering star.
I think this is so cool.
I would think that if meteoroids or comets (or whatever the ones that don't belong to solar systems are) exist, it would be a given that larger ones existed too.
I wonder if any of the planets in our own star system were ever wandering planets, and dropped in after the sun formed?
[editline]18th May 2011[/editline]
Fuck this shit, I feel like making a Sins of a Solar Empire map with a few rogue planets... :v:
Someone make a picture of one of these planets flying away from a solar system with the forever alone face.
[QUOTE=Zeke129;29912842]Couldn't life still thrive on one of these "wandering planets" underground if there was water and sufficient heat[/QUOTE]
Ice moons of giant wandering stars could have oceans and chemosynthetic life like what might be under Europa. I don't think there's much of a limit to life's ability to thrive throughout the universe.
Aren't gas giants just stars that didn't quite get enough heat to become a star? that is probably why they are so common, they are stars.
[QUOTE=Zeke129;29912842]Couldn't life still thrive on one of these "wandering planets" underground if there was water and sufficient heat[/QUOTE]
if the life was deep enough and the planet some how still had a molten core the yes, on the surface, no chance
Also these wandeirng planets may seem like they're wandering, but they are most likely orbiting something, just as comets and asteroids do.
I'm not surprised planets fly around the place
[QUOTE=Matix;29912871]Just the idea of those things is so mysterious and fascinating. Too bad they're probably all gigantic hunks of ice.[/QUOTE]
Not a bad thing at all. Sounds like a useful place to fill up on your travels.
inb4 one such planet "wanders" into us
and we become a pile of "wandering" space debris
[QUOTE=Awesomecaek;29916508]inb4 one such planet "wanders" into us
and we become a pile of "wandering" space debris[/QUOTE]
Well, not only is that [B]ridiculously[/B] unlikely given the vastness of space, but gravitational forces would probably navigate it straight through our solar system as the other planets pull on and redirect it. That's why the impending collision between Andromeda and the Milky Way really won't be a collision at all, since it's unlikely that many stars or planets will actually collide.
[QUOTE=Awesomecaek;29916508]inb4 one such planet "wanders" into us
and we become a pile of "wandering" space debris[/QUOTE]
i think you mean "inb4 one such planet 'wanders' onto the silver screen"
ITT: Planets are actually large creatures with a society of their own.
We need to mine them all out.
Then we can live on Earth: Devourer of Planets.
They say they're wandering planets... but I'd like to believe they're wandering Death Stars.
[img]http://files.renegadebs.com/miscjunk/SW-Deathstar.jpg[/img]
[QUOTE=Turnips5;29913700]Wandering planets... that's interesting, because the word "planet" comes from the greek "αστήρ" - which means wandering star.
I think this is so cool.[/QUOTE]
Makes sense, from a distance planets do look like any other star in the sky. The Greeks noticed that some "stars" didn't stay in their place in the sky but that they did have an orbit so they called them "wandering stars".
[QUOTE='Poesidan [GAG];29915714']Someone make a picture of one of these planets flying away from a solar system with the forever alone face.[/QUOTE]
[img]http://img263.imageshack.us/img263/9128/unledrvr.png[/img]
[QUOTE=Zeke129;29912842]Couldn't life still thrive on one of these "wandering planets" underground if there was water and sufficient heat[/QUOTE]
Anything could technically survive anywhere.
Who knows how live evolves out there in the universe, maybe they don't need water or heat and survive in a completely diffrent way.
It's hard for humanity to picture living a diffrent way mainly because the way us and the animals around us live is all we know about life, but out there in the vast space of this universe im sure life has evolved diffrently somwhere.
Regarding astronomy, I didn't planet to be so amazing.
:smug:
[QUOTE=Kialtia;29915984]Aren't gas giants just stars that didn't quite get enough heat to become a star? that is probably why they are so common, they are stars.[/QUOTE]
No, brown dwarfs are, gas planets are smaller again.
[QUOTE=madmanmad;29926846]Anything could technically survive anywhere.
Who knows how live evolves out there in the universe, maybe they don't need water or heat and survive in a completely diffrent way.
It's hard for humanity to picture living a diffrent way mainly because the way us and the animals around us live is all we know about life, but out there in the vast space of this universe im sure life has evolved diffrently somwhere.[/QUOTE]
You always need a source of energy to at least progress. Life, even on microscopic level is a biological which needs fuel. It has to be either light or other radiated source of energy, or energy stored in chemical potential. All the green shit on this planet uses energy from sun. All the rest survives on the surplus the green shit of this planet has created.
I believe that there can be life very far from our environmental habits, living in completely different temperature ranges, being independent on water and other resources which are vital for us, or perhaps even dwell in vacuum. However it will almost certainly need source of energy to exist, and such wandering planets might not have such. Of course, hot core could give some energy, but that would be probably awfully little.
What if wandering planets turn out to be a giant spaceship?
Wandering planets are like Ronins or hermits. They have no stars to orbit, no planets to mingle with
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