If this is recent information, how does it bear on dark matter, i.e. machos? An excellent read, btw.
Space Is Full of Planets, and Most of Them Don't Even Have Stars
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Re: Space Is Full of Planets, and Most of Them Don't Even Have Stars
#12I wonder what happens to the planets in the solar system when a rogue planets gets sucked into the star (sun) ? I mean, yeah it'd be bad if a rogue planet smashed into us, or even came close enough to mess with our gravitational pool (or the moons). but I imagine if an earth sized or bigger slammed into the sun, that we'd feel the effects of this. massive solar flare roasting our planet alive? a shower of ejecta from…
The voyage the planet takes through the solar system might drag some asteroids with it however, which could lead to some fun
Re: Space Is Full of Planets, and Most of Them Don't Even Have Stars
#13Re: Space Is Full of Planets, and Most of Them Don't Even Have Stars
#14I can't help but think of how the various Star Trek series handled rogue planets... and then later on how IRL science delved into rogue planets as more of a reality than previously realized.
Could you provide an example? I don’t recall such an episode.
Re: Space Is Full of Planets, and Most of Them Don't Even Have Stars
#15If this is recent information, how does it bear on dark matter, i.e. machos? An excellent read, btw.
This is not super recent information. There have been estimates that there are about as many rogue planets as stars since 2011. There's still a pretty wide variation in the estimate of the number of rogue planets from study to study, so the frequency is pretty uncertain. But even if the numbers are on the high side, it's not anywhere close to explain dark matter. Supposing that there are 10 Jupiter mass planets for e…
Re: Space Is Full of Planets, and Most of Them Don't Even Have Stars
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is not super recent information. There have been estimates that there are about as many rogue planets as stars since 2011. There's still a pretty wide variation in the estimate of the number of rogue planets from study to study, so the frequency is pretty uncertain. But even if the numbers are on the high side, it's not anywhere close to explain dark matter. Supposing that there are 10 Jupiter mass planets for e…
Not a physicist. If napkin calculation goes, that's 1000 Jupiters per star. Is that really improbable? There is a lot of space outside of solar system radii.
Re: Space Is Full of Planets, and Most of Them Don't Even Have Stars
#17I can't help but think of how the various Star Trek series handled rogue planets... and then later on how IRL science delved into rogue planets as more of a reality than previously realized.
Could you provide an example? I don’t recall such an episode.
Re: Space Is Full of Planets, and Most of Them Don't Even Have Stars
#18I wonder what happens to the planets in the solar system when a rogue planets gets sucked into the star (sun) ? I mean, yeah it'd be bad if a rogue planet smashed into us, or even came close enough to mess with our gravitational pool (or the moons). but I imagine if an earth sized or bigger slammed into the sun, that we'd feel the effects of this. massive solar flare roasting our planet alive? a shower of ejecta from…
Both the sun and the distance's involved are massive, so besides the scientific observations nothing will change. You would need something massive like a brown dwarf that's already near the fusion point to really screw up the sun The voyage the planet takes through the solar system might drag some asteroids with it however, which could lead to some fun
Re: Space Is Full of Planets, and Most of Them Don't Even Have Stars
#19It seems like there is an obvious further inference to make - people have debated whether life originated on earth or not. Given that the vast majority of planets do not have a star, and given that we know there are chemotrophs even on Earth that prove it is possible to live without a sun, it seems overwhelmingly likely that life came from one of these rogue planets that was large enough to retain enough heat underground for the evolution of life over the first few billion years of the universe. That would also neatly explain why evidence of life appeared so soon after the Earth became solid.
Re: Space Is Full of Planets, and Most of Them Don't Even Have Stars
#20I wonder what happens to the planets in the solar system when a rogue planets gets sucked into the star (sun) ? I mean, yeah it'd be bad if a rogue planet smashed into us, or even came close enough to mess with our gravitational pool (or the moons). but I imagine if an earth sized or bigger slammed into the sun, that we'd feel the effects of this. massive solar flare roasting our planet alive? a shower of ejecta from…
The Earth is roughly 333,000 times less massive than the Sun. Think of it this way, If an asteroid hit the Earth that was, in relative terms, the size of the earth relative to the sun, it would be about 1/3 the size of Ceres. Everything on Earth would die but the other planets would probably not notice.
Given that the surface of the Sun can be treated, to a first approximation, as a fluid, an impact that was perpendicular to the surface would likely have the same characteristics of a milk drop. Which is to say a large wave would race away from the impact point and the collapsing of that wave in would eject a bit of coronal mass roughly equal to 1% of the mass of the impactor (note this makes a big, and unsupported, assumption about the viscosity of the solar corona.)
The only scary bit comes if the rogue planet enters the solar system slightly off the plane of the ecliptic and hits the Sun in a glancing blow. In such a scenario it could transfer a huge amount of momentum into the coronal mass which would then immediately begin to head away from the Sun. If the Earth were in the path of that mass it would probably wipe everything out after blowing off our atmosphere.
This wouldn't be good for the rogue planet either, which would probably enter a hyperbolic orbit and shoot away from the solar system on a new trajectory. In the unfortunate circumstance that this "coronal braking maneuver" was sufficient to slow the planet enough to be captured by the Sun, the remaining planets would get to witness periodic brushes with the Sun by the rogue planet until it had lost enough energy to fall into the Sun.
That would be mitigated if the orbit it fell into pulled it by Jupiter or another large planet which, by virtue of its gravity circularize the orbit sufficiently that it would not come near the corona on future orbits.