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Astronomers uncover largest group of rogue planets yet

sciencedaily.com

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Re: Astronomers uncover largest group of rogue planets yet

#11
post #10

I’m imagining at least one rogue planet out there (they said they could be billions) was happily orbiting a star for billions of years, life formed, even relatively intelligent life, and then another rogue planet fell in to the solar system and passed right by the first planet in such a way as to eject it from the solar system without hitting it, and all this life on the planet suddenly loses daylight as their planet…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Pail_of_Air full text: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/51461

wow very cool thank you!

Re: Astronomers uncover largest group of rogue planets yet

#13
post #9

I’m imagining at least one rogue planet out there (they said they could be billions) was happily orbiting a star for billions of years, life formed, even relatively intelligent life, and then another rogue planet fell in to the solar system and passed right by the first planet in such a way as to eject it from the solar system without hitting it, and all this life on the planet suddenly loses daylight as their planet…

This could be a scenario for a doomsday movie. On another note, I wonder if our solar system has been visited by such rogue planet in the past.

Not exactly the same, but similar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wandering_Earth

Re: Astronomers uncover largest group of rogue planets yet

#14

I’m imagining at least one rogue planet out there (they said they could be billions) was happily orbiting a star for billions of years, life formed, even relatively intelligent life, and then another rogue planet fell in to the solar system and passed right by the first planet in such a way as to eject it from the solar system without hitting it, and all this life on the planet suddenly loses daylight as their planet…

Twilight Zone season 3 episode 10 titled "The Midnight Sun"

Re: Astronomers uncover largest group of rogue planets yet

#15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Above 13 Jupiter masses would it have to be a burned out star?

Brown dwarf? Some sputtering early attempts at fusion, but not enough to become self-sustaining. 13 Mj is on the low side of the definition. It's not a definitive number and goes as high as 80 Mj, depending who you ask.

13 Mj is the current mass at which people think deuterium fusion can start. Above 80 Mj, hydrogen fusion will start.

These numbers depend on a lot of details of stellar atmospheres.

I took a graduate-level Stellar Atmospheres class from S. Kumar, who first theorized about this class of not-quite-star.

Re: Astronomers uncover largest group of rogue planets yet

#17
Only tangentially related, but Melancholia is a beautiful (and uh melancholic) movie about a rogue planet that perfectly captures a prevailing mood about our present moment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melancholia_(2011_film)

Not that we ever actually have to worry about a collision with a rogue planet.

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