Billions of Lonely Planets, Adrift in Space

Billions of Lonely Planets, Adrift in Space

www.nytimes.com

Is the galaxy full of orphans?

Astronomers said Wednesday that space is littered with hundreds of billions of planets that have been ejected from the planetary systems that gave them birth and either are going their own lonely ways or are only distantly bound to stars at least as 10 times as far away as the Sun is from the Earth.

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Related News Links:
astronomyinformation.org

Related AboveTopSecret.com Discussion Threads:
A Revolution in Astronomy.
Expando Planet Theory more likely than Nirubu/Planet X...and happening NOW?!!!!

I thought this was an interesting article that deserved some attention. It seems that space is not as empty as we used to believe.

I found it a bit frustrating that the distance these Jupiter sized planets are away from other stars appears to be rather vague. Are they the same distance as Jupiter is from our Sun, from their stars, which would not make them orphans, or much further out from their stars than Jupiter is from our Sun?

Here is another thread which I feel discusses related material.

www.abovetopsecret.com...

Basically there is reason to challenge a great deal about our view of the universe, and a great deal of evidence that challenges the distances between stars that mainstream science puts out, and suggests that many bodies counted as stars, are not stars at all.

Could a great many f the supposed blue stars actually be large planets, mistaken for stars?

Then there is the Expanded Planet theory. Could large clouds in space explain the reason why our planet has experienced ice ages, and could absorption of matter from space while going through these space clouds have greatly expanded our planet over the last couple million years?



www.nytimes.com
(visit the link for the full news article)

Planets with no orbit or anything?

Wow.. interesting. I wonder if they are "spinning" out of control.

reply to post by CanadianDream420


I wonder how much other stuff is floating around in deep space. If there are these giant gas planets, then most likely there are far more much smaller planets, many Earth sized and smaller.

How much of this stuff eventually enters our solar system?

I read about this earlier and it friggin BLEW MY MIND!
The image of billions and billions (cue carl) of planets; frozen, lost, forgotten, plaguing interstellar space felt really strong. It kind of resonates, doesn't it?
And questions and "general wanderements" arise. Could an advanced civilization colonize such worlds? Could they be harvested, and populated? Is it even possible to "bio-form" a planet deeply in the wild, wild west of space? Or is it underground the way to go...?


...Dude!

This along with at least three other threads on this is not a confirmed discovery, can't people even read!!!!

reply to post by Illustronic


What the heck is a "confirmed discovery"? Sounds like something a high school kid made up.

What the article says.

www.nytimes.com...

The new work was done using a method known as gravitational microlensing, which is more sensitive to far-out planets. It relies on the ability of the gravitational field of a massive object — in this case a planet and its star — to bend light and act as a magnifying lens, as predicted by Einstein’s general theory of relativity.

Astronomers from two groups — Microlensing Observations in Astrophysics, based in New Zealand and Japan, and the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment, based in Poland and Chile — monitor the light from a vast field of background stars, looking for brief blips of increased brightness caused by a planet and its host star passing in the foreground.

The group recorded 10 such events consistent with being caused by planet-size objects but did not detect the corresponding blips from these planets’ host stars, suggesting either that they did not belong to any star, having been ejected by gravitational pinball games earlier in their lives, or that they were very distant.

Two groups have recorded the same results, both of which have excellent credentials, and are being taken very seriously by everyone with more than two brain cells to rub together.

More importantly, this supports research done by others that is greatly challenging a great many weak assumptions taken as fact with very little supporting evidence. See the links to threads I posted above.

reply to post by poet1b


Show us the article in Nature everyone is siting. I have yet to find it, I did however find in NatureNews stating;

"This is an amazing result, and if it's right, the implications for planet formation are profound," says astronomer Debra Fischer at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.

If, means speculative. Not a confirmation.

www.abovetopsecret.com...

You can find gravitational microlensing articles in Nature dating back to 1989, but none that confirm a planet.

reply to post by Illustronic


Umm, why don't you just read the NT Times article in my link?

The NY Times is considered to be a very credible source.

Here is a link provided in the NY Times article.

www.nature.com...

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 imaging9 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.

The site is named, "Nature International Journal of Weekly Science". Is that what you are looking for?

Sounds credible to me.

I was able to link through the NY Times article with no problem.

reply to post by poet1b


At last the source all of those article sited. I still would have to read all of the footnoted articles Nature sites to see how confirmed this is. 10 astronomical units is not free from a star. Some of the many gas giants are as far as hundreds of astronomical units away from their host star so this is a leap of an assumption without reading the sources Nature sites. Christ, Neptune is further than 10 astronomical units away from the sun, over 30 in fact, its no a rogue planet.

The last of these many article I would bother reading over would be one from The New York Times, so missed the only real link to the reference. I didn't read much more than speculation though. Nature publishes a paragraph and its all over space news siting all kinds of discoveries!

reply to post by Illustronic


You do have a point, 10 AU is not that far from a star, considering Neptune is that far away from Sol, but for smaller star systems, this might be a much larger factor.

It sounds like this is pretty new stuff. The plan is to launch a satellite to take better measurements, but NASA doesn't have the budget for it right now. We are too busy paying interest rates on repub deficits.

However, it sound like the scientific community is pretty confident in these reports.

reply to post by Illustronic


There are a whole heck of a lot of theories many take as gospel, which have very little evidence supporting those theories. This is what my original post starting the thread points out.

There is a full article on the subject, but you have to purchase it, or trust those who have.

reply to post by poet1b


Didn't mean to sound off on you personally, its just today this forum was flooded with this same report in so many words, and I was probing to find the source cited in Nature, which I respect as a reputable journal, but found circular links leading back to the many space news sections of all kinds of websites, and not the source. All of them used that same photo and I was getting frustrated. Things are much clearer now for me and I'd like to read about it more.

I seriously doubt any active life can exist outside of suspended animation on a rogue planet, and I was reading all kinds of 'artistic license' authors of the many articles I had to find nearly comprised of the same text like a news feed, speculative crap of earth-like rogue planets even, and got a bit exasperated by the many speculations particular authors were throwing around.

The fact there is only two known actual images of gas giants illuminated by a close star in existence, I took the news of finding one without a star highly speculative.

It would appear that we have several threads on this topic today. Please carry on the discussion here. Thank you.

Thread Closed.