Detecting Wandering Worlds That Host Life

There are many threads on this site claiming planet X and or nibiru is wondering about our solar system/Galaxy with life on it, or it's going to hit the Earth etc etc...personally I've never subscribed to that way of thinking, but new studies suggest that in fact life could be hosted on a rouge planet (Interstellar planet) that has no gravitational bond to a parent star.

So far we use a few methods of detection to find planets orbiting far off stars such as the radial velocity method or transit photometry, but as far as I'm aware interstellar planets have not been studied yet, planetary scientist 'Heikki Vanhamaki' at the Finnish Meteorological Institute in Helsinki believes detecting the radio waves given off by their auroras is indeed a possible way to detect them:

"It has been speculated that Earth-like rogue planets could have very thick atmosphere that keeps them relatively warm, or moons of giant rogue planets could experience tidal heating and have oceans beneath their icy surface"

Scientists recently suggested that alien worlds around distant stars could be detected by looking for radio waves given off by their auroras. Now Vanhamaki calculates the same technique might work for interstellar planets.

So while I still don't believe in the whole planet X/nibiru story telling, it would appear we are possibly able to detect these interstellar planets through aurora detection, and they could host life..

A very interesting paper from the Astrobiology Magazine, check it out if this type of thing floats your boat.


Astrobiology Magazine

This is pretty cool, great find.

You would think planets floating around between systems would just become frozen husks. I am going to read this article now.

You link isn't working for me, Astrobiology Magazine

reply to post by watchitburn



Hi watchitburn, I fixed the link..cheers for pointing that out..

Yeah you would think interstellar planets would be big frozen balls of rock and ice, but if you think about it Europa is supposed to have a sea beneath the ice crust due to gravitational stretching, so a wandering planet that has a moon gravitationally locked to it could also have this mechanism going on, if the planet also has an atmosphere with thick clouds like Venus surrounding it, the possibility of it hosting life goes up somewhat, it's very interesting to know they could possibly detect a rouge plant using it's aurora...

Zooniverse offer are range of public activities to aid scientists with their search for such things as planets, moon mapping, solar storms, logging galaxies etc.

www.zooniverse.org...

reply to post by EnigmaAgent



Cool website and idea EnigmaAgent, I'll look into this thanks...

Second.............

reply to post by Majestic RNA


never-mind answered my own question, nice article

we have life here on Earth around deep sea thermal vents, some of it would continue to exist if there was no Sun also we are finding more and more bacteria deep in the crust of our planet. Everywhere we look we find life it becomes harder to believe that life is not everywhere with every new discovery

new research on Hydrothermal Vents

reply to post by iforget


Heh, the "we are the only living planet in the universe" argument is a futile one IMO, also a bit arrogant of people to think we are the only planet that hosts life.. with the size of the universe and all the billions of stars and planets and like you say the discovery of life where we just wouldn't expect it, odds are there is life teeming all over the place.. we just need to find it... (excluding microbes form Mars etc)

I personally think we are in a back water part of the universe/galaxy, out of the way of other planets that host sentient life... I guess only time will tell, I have seen some mad things flying around in the sky mind you, that I don't have an answer for so who knows? maybe we've already been contacted... that's a whole other thread though

A body with no star supporting life is absolute bunk, junk science, and calling it junk science is really discrediting science. This kid author has zero astrophysics background and majored in journalism. This article is nothing but a creative writing exercise or Sci Fi entertainment, and I don't believe the physics he had to take to study to be a marine biologist he paid any attention in or outright flunked out.

Charles Quixote Choi

Originally posted by Illustronic
A body with no star supporting life is absolute bunk, junk science, and calling it junk science is really discrediting science. This kid author has zero astrophysics background and majored in journalism. This article is nothing but a creative writing exercise or Sci Fi entertainment, and I don't believe the physics he had to take to study to be a marine biologist he paid any attention in or outright flunked out.

Charles Quixote Choi

Bit of a knee jerk reaction there Illustronic, don't ya think?

Did you read the article? because surely if you had you would have noticed "Charles Quixote Choi" was quoting "Heikki Vanhamäki" who is a scientist at the Finnish Meteorological Institute in Helsinki.
The scientist is on the Ionospheric research team and specializes in observing different auroral phenomena in various spatial scales in both ionospheric and magnetospheric physics. So I'd say he knows a bit about auroras and ionospheric observations and how to detect them wouldn't you??

Heikki Vanhamäki

Ionospheric Research at FMI

The article is primarily explaining the new research regarding detecting planets in a new way, i.e. detecting their auroras through radio waves:

New Radio Wave Technique Could Detect Alien Planets

In turn Heikki Vanhamaki is suggesting interstellar planets could be detected in this way:

"My results show that there is a real, although small, chance of detecting moon-induced emissions from giant rogue planets that weigh more than eight Jupiter masses,"

He is also saying:

"It has been speculated that Earth-like rogue planets could have very thick atmosphere that keeps them relatively warm, or moons of giant rogue planets could experience tidal heating and have oceans beneath their icy surface,"

So if we put all this information together what do we get?? well... it's been proven you don't need sunlight for life to survive:

Life in the Deep


So in reality it's not bunk or junk science is it Illustronic, it's speculation fo'sure but is entirely possible that an interstellar planet could host life if it had a moon trapped in a tidal lock in orbit around it, this would cause "Gravitational Tides" that would effect both the planet and the moon:

Gravitational Tides

So if you have a moon or a planet in interstellar space without a parent star but is heated up in the core causing a trapped sea under the ice crust, then it's reasonable to suggest it could indeed harbour life...

Jupiter's Moon Europa: What Could Be Under The Ice?

If you personally believe this is all bunk and junk science then fair enough, that's up to you Illustronic, I only made the thread to inform members who may be interested in this type of space exploration, but I personally think if "Charles Quixote Choi" was writing the article as a "creative writing exercise or Sci Fi entertainment" then the following online SCIENTIFIC websites wouldn't touch it with a barge pole...


Space Daily

Physorg

portaltotheuniverse

There are many more too, you just have to google it....

Many points brought up that in fact require a sun to ever have given genesis to planet to have formed, let alone any kind of atmosphere in the first place. So its a conjectured opinion that an expelled solar formed planet with existing life could harbor the dying life on its near absolute zero journey through interstellar space, for a while.

Earth's tectonic plates are unique in this solar system, no other planet or moon have shifting plates. Europa does not help Jupiter's internal heat the sun does, and Jupiter's gravitational interaction with its other moons and the sun is the 'friction' that warms Europa, take away the sun, the moons plummet into the host planet one by one, the other moons wont keep poor tiny Europa in orbit and Jupiter would just travel aimlessly one tenth the mass to becoming a failed star, eventually cools to a terrestrial lifeless rock.

But let me review the paper by D. S. Abbot and E. R. Switzer first, to see what the basis is in their 'THE STEPPENWOLF: A PROPOSAL FOR A HABITABLE PLANET IN INTERSTELLAR SPACE'. At first I read a lot of conjecture, or life on paper so to speak.

What do you personally think the lifespan of a galactic ejected star might be? Would it grow, lose mass to the empty cold, or eventually get sucked into another galaxy before it fizzles out? Intergalactic stars are a much debated topic currently so proposing interstellar active planets seems the likely next step into speculation, at least to me.

You guys should just ask me where they are

i'm only wandering this one right now

reply to post by Illustronic


Agree with what you said about planets requiring a host star. For a planet to create intelligent life from scratch, it would have to sit in the sweet spot around it's star, much like we do.

If said planet was thrown out of the solar system, life wouldn't last very long. All the process on our planet are driven by the sun.

An intelligent species might go underground, but the planet then becomes a giant space station (star wars anyone?) and it would require some serious tech and know how to keep themselves alive.