This is the last thing I expected, we live in an amazing age of discovery. From the AAAS:
Astrophysicist Takahiro Sumi of Osaka University in Japan and colleagues—who form the Microlensing Observations in Astrophysics (MOA) and the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment (OGLE) collaborations—now appear to have figured out what is what. In a paper published online today in Nature, the researchers list 10 objects in our galaxy that are very likely to be free-floating planets. What’s more, they claim that in our galaxy, free-floaters are probably so populous that they outnumber stars.
Full story here
Considering everything I have read on the formation of solar systems and the fact that interactions between planets are probably fairly common early in the life of them with planets being ejected from orbits around their stars, it surprises me that it took this long to find them.
Can you imagine a Jupiter-sized rogue planet flying near (or through!) our solar system!
Holy Toledo!
It seems to me quite logical that the small nebulae that form into planets would be far more common than the large nebulae that form stars. It is likely that there are 100s or 1000s of dark bodies in the galaxy for every object that is large enough to trigger nuclear fusion and become visible to us.
It is remarkable that our technology has improved to the point that we can detect any of them.
reason says:
May 20, 2011 at 7:07 am
Kelvin Vaughan says:
May 20, 2011 at 3:58 am
MattH says:
May 19, 2011 at 11:42 pm
AdderW says:
May 19, 2011 at 11:32 pm
“No one really likes a floater…
But the rest of us are flush with excitement!!
This is a load of crap!
Would you like to submit a white-paper?”
Yes! To support a search for KlingOns circling Uranus!
};>) Star Treking – There’s Klingons on the starboard bow, Jim!
Greg,
Actually if you look closely our orbits aren’t all that stable either. There is actually a small but measurable chance that Jupiter could perturb Mars’ orbit enough to fling it off into space or worse towards the inner planets. I don’t think we want the Earth playing dodge ball with Mars. The planets might find it fun, but I don’t think we would. There are also some instabilities in Venus’ orbit that could lead to some problems as well. As I recall reading the studies, it didn’t really take that much perturbation to cause some catastrophic effects on our cushy place in orbit.
Looking at the paths of the planetary orbits, there is significant wobble. I bet we would be hard pressed to find a time where any of the planets duplicated their state vectors from an earlier time. There is some dynamic chaos in all of it.
So…. COULD… yeah that is the new science. I remember when discovery was actually finding something, not deciding something COULD be there… I love the words: could, probably, very likely. Great science, maybe.
But although Jupiter mass is 317 times heavier than our own planet, our sun is still a 1000 times heavier than Jupiter.
We’re working on it!
Owen says:
May 20, 2011 at 9:01 am
Greg,
Actually if you look closely our orbits aren’t all that stable either…
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Sure, but it’s been stable enough for complex life and a technological civilization to develop here. Are there boundry conditions of some sort keeping the orbits mostly in line, despite the wobbles?
Every simulation I’ve seen discusses the possibility of planets being flung one way or another and the difficulty of creating a stable system and yet… here we are. Why?
A runaway planet causing an apocalypse was the basis for one of my favorite Saturday morning cartoons as a kid:
LhAobPugvsk
Edit… I don’t seem to have the embedding of Youtube links figured out. Direct link:
http://youtu.be/LhAobPugvsk
Aren’t these just failed stars and shouldn’t there be almost as many of them as their are stars?
Planetary formation and solar system theories have for a while been requiring that planets be thrown away from a star. Someone has finally been able to combine observation with the math.
When your science is based on the wrong theory it rarely predicts or helps you understand new observations. On the other hand, the hypotheses put forward by Electric Universe types explains this quite well. Gravity is not the driver, current is.
Good living? Or it could be that on a solar system time scale, life has been around for just a blink of an eye.
I forgot to mention the Mercury problem. My favorite scenario is a perturbation causing Venus to be more elliptical and flinging the relatively lightweight Mercury out of the solar system.
Even in the models I ran it took tens to hundreds of Jupiter orbits to really fling Mars, perturbing it a little more each time until it reached enough eccentricity to cause problems or gain enough velocity to escape the system.
My models had problems when planets got too close together as it was only a 5th order approximation on a 32bit (double precision 64bit) so if things moved too fast or forces got too high there was some truncation error resulting in lost energy. (to test it I put two Sol sized stars in orbit at .1 AU from each other and ran the simulation. Within 1000 orbits they were at >2AU from each other, but if I started them at 1 AU they were still within 1.1 AU at 1 million orbits.) Some of the NASA studies I looked at had 12th order approximations on parallel processing data with much high precisions and they had some similar planet flinging results.
Pretty obvious, really. I said these would be out there decades ago.
If matter is condensing around nuclei, then some will condense as vast deposits of matter, and some as small deposits. The latter are these ‘new’ free floaters. So, to make another prediction, these free floaters will not simply benplanets, they will be minature solar systems, complete with subsidiary planets circling a sun that never had enough mass to switch on.
.
This is a wonderful thread with everyone’s speculation. And then there’s this:
Allan M says:
“I can tell from the photo that this isn’t a planet. It’s one of the cricket balls struck by Ian Botham in his innings of 149 not out against Australia at Headingley in 1981.”
That is as Alien a language as American baseball must be to our Australian friends. Klaatu barada nikto…
Also, there must be plenty of stuff floating around that is too small to detect. Can anyone do a calculation of the energy that would be released in a collision with a one ounce [≈25 gram] pebble with a starship moving at 5,000 miles [or ≈8,000 km] per second?
Space may not be as empty as we thought, so we’ll just have to figure out another way around that onerous and inconvenient lightspeed limit.
Unbound planets have been a subject of science fiction for years. I find the title to this article amusing for just that reason. It is pure speculation, as is most science fiction.
Smokey,
It is bad enough when the shuttle hits a paint flake in orbit. Some of the gouges in the windshields are scary after a mission. I can barely imagine what it would look like on a 0.01c flight. Staying metric, a one gram flake hitting with a 3000 km/s (0.01c) closure velocity would hit with an energy of 4,500,000,000 Joules (neglecting the very small relativistic correction at that speed) or the equivalent of exploding 26.1 cubic meters of natural gas. In other words a very large release of energy that would destroy most spaceships.
Small correction. 4.5 times 26.1 (over 117) cubic meters of natural gas. The 26.1 figure was for 1X10^9 Joules
@Owen
At 3 km/s a object has the same amount of kinetic energy as his own weight in TNT. So a well timed release of six pack could do tremendous amount of damage to a spacecraft like the shuttle.
Ke = 0.5 * M * V2
Ke = kinetic energy (Joules)
M = mass of projectile (kg)
V = velocity of projectile relative to target (m/s)
0.5 * 1 kg * 3000 m/s^2 = 4.5 million joules, roughly the same as 1 kg of TNT.
And in space a 3 km/s speed difference isn’t that much.
Jeremy says:
May 20, 2011 at 6:59 am
This is actually terrible news.
If free-floating planets exist and outnumber stars, how do you travel between stars at any high rate of speed without slamming into one?
You probably would be able to use a very sensitive gravity detector to see them “coming” (or in actuality, you falling down the well). There wouldn’t be much exteraneous noise out there.
Patrick says:
May 19, 2011 at 11:19 pm
@Jenn, actually, English teachers have to be on the cutting edge of painfully awkward gender-neutral neologisms, deconstructionist arguments that prove what is written is thee opposite of what is meant, and the ever accelerating treadmill of euphemisms, or else they shall be branded haters, apostates, and right-wingers.
I don’t like the word “euphemism” – can’t you use a different one?
Greg, Spokane WA says:
May 20, 2011 at 7:47 am
So how is it possible for this solar system to remain so stable? Luck? Are there some orbital mechanics that we don’t know enough about?
You could try asking the inhabitants of Planet…err…it’s name escapes me – it’s the next one in from Mars.
Quick recap:
1. Is it plausible that the average star expels two Jupiter-sized planets to interstellar space? No. What is doing the work? Something bigger?
2. Is it plausible that many of the “free floating” Jupiter-sized planets are actually orbiting their stars quite far and slowly, say, like Jupiter and Saturn do? Yes. That’s
what happens in our system.
3. Is it plausible that interstellar space contains the remains of many self-collapsed mini-clouds capable to make planets but not stars? Maybe.
4. Can all of the above be a substitute for “dark matter”? No, it wouldn’t be enough even if the average were 100 Jupiters for each Sun.
5. Are any of those planets a danger to interstellar navigation? Of course not…their volumes are infinitesimal compared to interstellar space.
With the completely different compositions of each of the moons of Saturn and Jupiter, I would seem that they have caught several of the smaller objects coming into our solar system already.
The Earth did its share and took a direct hit in order to remake itself and the moon out of the debris.
Good to know we live on a planet that is a team player.
I could see the logic behind proto-stellar discs that were too small to make stars, but free & wandering part feeds into the Niburu stories. If that’s really the case, Giant Stars should be gobbling up passing stars and dwarf stars.