Astronomer discovers strange new planets that don’t orbit stars

[atsimg]http://files.abovetopsecret.com/images/member/61e56534cc51.jpg[/atsimg]

Bennett directed telescopes toward the center of the Milky Way and found a lot of lensing - probably from large planets. The technique has been used to find exoplanets before. They bend the light of the star they orbit when they pass between that star and earth observatories. But these new examples of lensing did not happen right next to stars. They happened out in the vastness of space. Crunching the data showed that Jupiter-sized planets were doing the lensing, but they weren't orbiting any stars. They were just floating free. It's been shown that in crowded solar systems, two planets can interact gravitationally, causing one planet to lose energy and fall towards the sun. These planets were created when one planet got an extra kick of energy and spun out, away from its solar system.
Bennett's data showed evidence for at least ten of these starless planets. There may be just as many starless planets as there are stars. And given that gravitational lensing only works with large planets, we may never know how many small, Earth-sized planets are floating through space on their own.

Link to full story

Just found this interesting and wanted to share.
The thought of drifting on one of these inhabitable wandering planets brings to mind ideas of how an intelligent species such as our own would adapt to it. It is like a 'gypsy' world where home is everywhere and nowhere. Time and space would always be changing due to the position of the planet in the solar system. I find it fascinating trying to imagine what life and there calendar would be based on in this situation.
Enjoy. . . . AB

Alt. Source Nature

Since it's the near the centre of the galaxy...could indeed they be circling another large object of mega gravity e.g. black hole or such?

Planets don't have to orbit stars or even an astronomical object. They rotate around the centre of mass which could be the midpoint between two dense objects...and that could be at a random bit of gas in space.

It could be the new Nibiru

its just a matter of time before its captured into the orbit of another system . It was probably knocked off orbit by a large impact but will be back on course soon as its close enough to another gravatational pull . They all need something to orbit ... you know why ? because planets are bitches and stars and black holes are alpha males HOORAH

reply to post by BlackPoison94


This article brought me to a documentary about the possibilities of a planet such as ours or larger in mass surviving the death of a star similar to our type. The theory eventually led to a point in where the star being a cold dark barely visible mass with a planet left orbiting it.
Im kicking myself I cant remember the name of the film but it was interesting and led to the same situation, which was a lone planet seemingly drifting in space.
I dont know, it just reminded me of it....such an interesting read thank you OP for the post

reply to post by BlackPoison94


This stuff intrigues me but can you explain or prove that a black hole has something like mega gravity? I don't really follow this stuff too closely. Can they prove that black holes have that force? Is that the reason we can't really send anything into a black hole to see if we can track where it goes? Sorry if these questions are dumb to someone who knows, but I am interested in this stuff and just want a short lesson if someone could do so.

I don't see no life happening on those types of planets but imagine the metal resources they could contain.

Originally posted by AnteBellum
Just found this interesting and wanted to share.

There are a couple of threads already on ATS about these exoplanets, and EVERY one of them has turned into speculation about Nibiru. "Could this be proof?!?!?!?!" etc...

Cause thats what ATS is like, isnt it?

reply to post by alfa1


If it were Nibiru it would be orbiting our sun on an elliptical orbit very far away.
Which means it would come back at some point.

These planets just drift around endlessly never in the same place twice.

reply to post by Chrisfishenstein


Hey no problemo. A black hole is to be honest, a really really really dense object, usually formed by a supernovae collapsing...and forms a singularity. The more mass an object has, the more gravitational attraction there is. Light can't even escape because it's so strong!

The post below is ABSOLUTELY AMAZING! Read it

reply to post by topherman420


Ooh, is it possible for you to find it for me? That's really interesting! There are actually lots of cold dwarf stars roaming around since they died..aww, it's so cute.

Originally posted by Chrisfishenstein
reply to post by BlackPoison94

 

This stuff intrigues me but can you explain or prove that a black hole has something like mega gravity? I don't really follow this stuff too closely. Can they prove that black holes have that force? Is that the reason we can't really send anything into a black hole to see if we can track where it goes? Sorry if these questions are dumb to someone who knows, but I am interested in this stuff and just want a short lesson if someone could do so.

Black holes you need to go there to see whats up =p but since we can't well just look at the observations ?

anything that crosses the event horizon which is the point of no return between where you can escape the black hole and you can't . You cross that line then there is no turning back


light can't escape so we have to turn to another way to detect whats going on

Since stellar black holes are small (only a few to a few tens of kilometers in diameter), and light that would allow us to see them cannot escape, a black hole floating alone in space would be hard, if not impossible, to see in the visual spectrum.

However, if a black hole passes through a cloud of interstellar matter, or is close to another "normal" star, the black hole can accrete matter into itself. As the matter falls or is pulled towards the black hole, it gains kinetic energy, heats up and is squeezed by tidal forces. The heating ionizes the atoms, and when the atoms reach a few million Kelvin, they emit X-rays. The X-rays are sent off into space before the matter crosses the Schwarzschild radius and crashes into the singularity. Thus we can see this X-ray emission.

imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov...


How do we know that black holes exist?
Until recently, black holes were just theories and speculations. However, on February 27, 1994, the Hubble Space Telescope discovered what seemingly had to be a black hole. There wasn't any other explanation for it. Other black hole candidates had been found before, but none that couldn't be explained otherwise, as was the case with this 3-billion-solar-mass black hole at the center of M87

library.thinkquest.org...


What happens if I jump into a black hole?
If an astronaut were going in a black hole, it would be a one-way trip. Long before the astronaut event arrived at the edge of the black hole, the difference between the forces acting on his head and the forces acting on his feet would stretch him like toffy. Finally, the astronaut would meet his death when he hit the singularity at the center of the black hole, as his atoms compress to infinite density and zero volume, becoming part of the singularity


Do black holes live forever?
According to Professor Hawking, no. He says that as a result of losing energy and mass through Hawking radiation, there would come a point when the black hole no longer has enough mass to completely curve the space around it, therefore ceasing to be a black hole. Hawking predicts that the black hole might then explode with a force of millions of hydrogen bombs! "








"There are at least two kinds of black holes
One kind is called a stellar-mass black hole. You can think of it as a "one-big-star" black hole. This type of black hole forms when a big star burns up all its fuel and explodes (called a supernova). Then what's left collapses into a super-compact object—a black hole. Stars must contain quite a bit more matter than our Sun for this to happen. So our Sun, and most stars, will never become black holes.

Stellar-mass black holes are only a few tens of kilometers across—maybe about 40 miles. Just imagine. Our Sun is so huge that about one million Earths would fit inside it. A star with enough matter to become a black hole contains maybe 10 times as much matter as the Sun. Now imagine a star with that much matter, shrinking into a space no farther across than the distance you can drive a car in less than one hour!"

"Another kind of black hole is called a supermassive black hole. You can think of this type as a "million-big-star" black hole, because it contains as much matter as one million to 100 million Suns! Astronomers think that supermassive black holes are lurking at the centers of galaxies, including our own Milky Way galaxy. They don't know yet how these humongous "

spaceplace.nasa.gov...

Black holes have one impact here on earth....I get a headache everytime I start reading about them lol.

Thanks for the info, got any tylenol with that?

Originally posted by seedofchucky
Do black holes live forever?
According to Professor Hawking, no. He says that as a result of losing energy and mass through Hawking radiation, there would come a point when the black hole no longer has enough mass to completely curve the space around it, therefore ceasing to be a black hole. Hawking predicts that the black hole might then explode with a force of millions of hydrogen bombs! "

Good job on most of your post, you got most of it right, but you got that part wrong. Actually, you may be mis-quoting professor Hawking there, that's not exactly what he says, unless you can provide an exact quote from him to that effect, I think you've misunderstood him.

That would only apply to black holes with a mass less than the moon, which we've never seen any evidence of, nor are we even sure such black holes exist, or if they once did they have probably already evaporated away from the Hawking radiation:

en.wikipedia.org...

A stellar black hole of one solar mass has a Hawking temperature of about 100 nanokelvins. This is far less than the 2.7 K temperature of the cosmic microwave background. Stellar mass (and larger) black holes receive more mass from the cosmic microwave background than they emit through Hawking radiation and will thus grow instead of shrink. To have a Hawking temperature larger than 2.7 K (and be able to evaporate), a black hole needs to be lighter than the Moon (and therefore a diameter of less than a tenth of a millimeter).

So, what is the smallest black hole ever discovered?

Astronomers have identified the smallest known black hole—an object about 3.8 times as massive as the sun....
scientists believe that these black holes can only form from stars several times the mass of the sun. But nobody's sure where the mass cutoff is.

"This limit is somewhere between two and three solar masses," Shaposhnikov said. "So with a detection of 3.8 solar masses, we get quite close to that boundary."

So let's use the lower limit in that range for black holes, of 2 solar masses.

Such a black hole will last as long as the 2.7K temperature of the cosmic background exceeds the less than 0.0000001K temperature of the black hole which results from Hawking radiation. I'm not sure if the temperature of the cosmic microwave background will stay above 100 nanokelvins forever since forever is a really long time, but I'd say that will be the case for billions and billions of years.

So I think professor Hawking's math shows that black holes larger than the moon's mass don't evaporate, and since we think 2-3 solar masses might be the lower limit for a black hole to form, then the black holes we know of, the ones 3.8 solar masses and larger, won't evaporate in the foreseeable future.

There's also pretty good observational evidence that there aren't a bunch of smaller black holes evaporating, as they would give off quite noticeable signatures in doing so, and we don't observe those signatures. So there's certainly reason to question if black holes smaller than 2 solar masses exist, or if they do they would appear to be quite rare. It wouldn't surprise me if we created some nano-black holes in the LHC but I've heard of no evidence for that yet, and their existence would be very brief, well less than one second.

Regarding the "planets without stars", yes there are already other threads on this topic. It's really not that surprising. It's thought that a mars-sized planet crashed into the Earth and the result was the formation of the Earth's moon. What if that collision was instead a near miss, or even just a nick instead of a large impact? Could the proto-planet have instead of forming earth's moon, been gravitationally slungshot outside the solar system? Or if it just nicked the Earth and the impact sent it outside the solar system without destroying it? That could have formed a rogue planet. In fact it wouldn't surprise me if some of these rogue planets account for some of the "missing dark matter", though they can't account for all of it.

reply to post by Arbitrageur


yes you are correct good sir thank you for clearing that up . The hawking radiation would grow instead of shrink for the larger steller masses.