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
Dr. Heinz Doofenschmertz. Founder: Doofenschmertz Evil, Inc. says:
May 20, 2011 at 7:11 am
The Earth will be next, just as soon as I complete my Solar Destroyinator!
See, see, it even runs on solar power. A beautiful combination of “green” and “evil,” or “greevil.” Ironic, really, don’t you think, using solar power to destroy the sun? That’s how evil rolls…
But Doofenschmertz, you forgot to mention abject voyeurism, a consequence of greevil. In order to see the effects, you must OGLE.
o·gle/ˈōgəl/
Noun: A lecherous look.
Verb: Stare at in a lecherous manner: “he was ogling her breasts”; “men who had turned up to ogle”. More »
Dictionary.com – Answers.com – Merriam-Webster – The Free Dictionary
Owen says:
May 20, 2011 at 9:01 am
“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.”
There must be some kind of negative feedback or governing force nudging the planets back into their orbit or otherwise the system couldn’t be stable for millions of years. That would be the obvious conclusion for a systems guy (like me). Just saying “chaotic attractor” doesn’t cut it for me. The theory of gravity can’t solve the three-body problem and we have many more bodies around here.
So. I didn’t say “electric universe”; but there is something that needs to be answered, and hasn’t been answered by now.
omnologos says:
May 20, 2011 at 2:59 pm
“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.”
Did they dicover all free wandering objects? No, only some Jupiter-sized biggies. Will we discover loads and loads of smaller ones later, with better instruments? Very likely, i would say. Will there be much much more of the small ones? Very likely as well. So whether these free wanderers explain dark matter or not is an open question ATM.
DirkH,
There may be many explanations for many things, but the Japanese moon shot was damaged on launch and didn’t have enough fuel to do the mission. A pretty smart mathematician found an attracting node that would get the spacecraft to the moon and the spacecraft happened to have enough fuel to reach that mathematical anomaly. The proof in the theory this time was the Japanese mission making it to lunar injection orbit. It wasn’t able to do everything planned, but not bad for a “failed” launch.
what about intergalactic space? very few stars, but maybe very large numbers of planets and planetoids.
Supposing these planets are only lit by starlight, how bright could they be at most if they are a few light years from a star. Would a star 3 or 4 light years away contribute as much light as all the rest of the stars in the galaxy. Would we ever be able to see these planets except at very close range? Would it be very dark on such a world? How dark is it on the far side of the moon when neither the earth or sun is in the sky?
Lee,
I think the best way to detect them would be with a gravitational anomaly. You won’t see them in light, but you might see their gravitational attraction. (As Z suggested earlier.)
This was predicted as far back as the 1900’s! Some binary stars throw some planets out of their orbit to wander cold and alone among the stars. Besides being a traffic hazard for very fast starships and a good plot device for a doomsday movie they don’t matter much. Someone will rant about the danger of a black planet sweeping though the system and alters all the orbits and planetary rotation rates dooming humanity. Ok It may be not be that bad, techobabble for SF is often over simplistic. A planet would be seen decades ahead of arrival. The the tidal effects would be minute and a 20 cubic mile asteroid on a close pass would have a similar effect. Space stations could be built in a decade to save mankind if necessary. Planets are convenient but no longer essential. We can all breath easy.
The article links (“life on Earth could have originated from a free-floater”) to an even more interesting article:
Outcast Planets Could Support Life
http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2011/02/outcast-planets-could-support-li.html?ref=hphttp://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2011/02/outcast-planets-could-support-li.html?ref=hp
“By comparing the rate at which heat would be lost through an ice shell with the rate at which heat would be produced by geothermal activity, they calculated that a planet with Earth’s composition of rock and water but three times as big would generate enough heat to maintain a hidden ocean. If the planet had much more water than Earth, say Abbot and Switzer, it would need to be only about a third as big as our planet. “Several kilometers of water ice make an excellent blanket that could be sufficient to support liquid water at its base,” says Switzer.”
Rouge planets. These must be the “bad” planets that couldn’t get along, sassed back to their mothers, didn’t eat their Milky-Way bars, etc.
I’d think it’d be hard to fling a planet completely out of a system. Hasn’t most of the mass flung out of our system ended up still gravitationally bound out in the Oort Cloud?
And perhaps a small-mass dust-gas cloud collapsed & formed a Jupiter-mass “planet” as its central “star” straight away? Red dwarfs outnumber all other stars. Would gas-cloud collapses just stop at forming red-dwarfs, but not include smaller-mass brown dwarfs & Jupiter-like planets in their centers?
I can’t believe no one has yet mentioned the Death Star, Dyson spheres, or the Pierson’s Puppeteers! : )
AnonyMoose says:
May 20, 2011 at 10:01 am
“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.”
The nebular theory of star formation was originally postulated by Kant in the 1700’s, just a little bit before the space age. You won’t believe how perfectly it has stood up to any test, with just a few adjustments:
1.Planets migrate out; not enought material where the gas giants are now for them to have formed there
2. Planets migrate in; the exoplanets must have migrated in and begun rotating in 4 day orbits around their sun
3. Planets are expelled apparently
4. Planets are gravitationally captured; they must be because of contrary rotations
There is nothing that the nebular hypothesis of solar system formation doesn’t either require or allow.
Even if all planet-sized bodies were formed as ‘spin-offs’ of the formation of their parent stars, all it would take would be a near encounter with another stellar mass to modify the orbits of some of their associated planets to such an extent that they would be unbound by either star. The prevalence of stars with planets detected in highly elliptical orbits (like having Jupiter in an orbit that goes out as far away from the Sun as Saturn and as close in as Mercury) suggests that this may be a rather common galactic hazard.
Perhaps those calculations on the probability of extra-terrestrial civilizations should include the probable number of undisturbed stellar systems in the galaxy.
From omnologos on May 20, 2011 at 2:59 pm:
Like traveling along at night in a rocket-powered car at 300mph on a smooth and straight highway… then you suddenly find an infinitesimal amount of the space on the highway occupied by a boulder directly ahead… and “popping the chute” is NOT an option.
Although I’d be more concerned about the planned long drifting phase between originating and destination points. It’d really be a bummer to be woken up from cold sleep, ready to prepare for arrival, and find out automatic computerized course corrections due to the influence of a previously-unknown wandering planet has used up the fuel you needed for deceleration.
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From beng on May 21, 2011 at 7:18 am:
This is why they’re reddish, the shame and embarrassment. Well, except for the Moulin subclass, they can get pretty colorful. 😉
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FunnyGuy says:
May 21, 2011 at 7:20 am
I can’t believe no one has yet mentioned the Death Star, Dyson spheres, or the Pierson’s Puppeteers! : )
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It’s because the Puppeteer home-world cluster is still heading for the Large Magellanic Cloud at near light-speed, fleeing the explosion at the Milky Way’s center (but the Hindmost is still at the Ringworld, along with Louis Wu).
I hate the way people try to re-name things, they’re almost always “artless.”
Would you rather be a lovable “rogue planet” or a “free-floating” planet of questionable means?
Re: Velikovsky
He, Sitchen, and others (more or less astronomically- vs. mythologically-oriented) did postulate rogue planets either joining, striking, or interfering with the orbits of “native” planets. It’s quite an old idea, if you believe Sitchen’s interpretations, the Sumerians thought of it.
Unfortunately (or naturally), ideas considered “fringe” are not studied seriously, so we have no idea about that as a factual matter, we’re stuck with mythology.
A quick internet search of descriptions/questions on the subject show that most advocates of the ideas have a sort of weird, summarized, distorted version of the original ideas in mind, so it’s not surprising that no one wants to seriously study the questions.
I think there was a serious attempt to survey astronomical and historical evidence related to Velikovsky’s collision hypothesis in the 70s, it was inconclusive IIRC.
Robert says:
May 20, 2011 at 7:07 am
“This is not the dark matter that we are looking for, even if these lone planets outnumber stars 2 to 1, than it will still only increase the mass of normal matter with only a few tenth of a percent at the most, and that is very optimistic.
Planets up to 13 times Jupiter mass are still considered to be planets, between 13 and 80 times Jupiter mass its a brown dwarf, above that it is a red dwarf. But although Jupiter mass is 317 times heavier than our own planet, our sun is still a 1000 times heavier than Jupiter.”
Depends upon how many of these there are, plus black holes, plus brown dwarfs. “Dark matter” was invented to explain discrepancies in orbital velocities of the things we CAN see. That does not mean it actually exists in the form presently hypothesized. Every time we have directly observed we have found our theories of how things work is much different from theory. The planets in our solar system and their moons are prime examples.
RE: Merovign (May 21, 2011 at 4:59 pm)
I hate the way people try to re-name things, they’re almost always “artless.”
Perhaps ‘Galactic Planet’ would be a better description as long as they are still in loose orbit around the galaxy. Another term that could be used is ‘Vagrant Planet.’ There is probably a large mass of vagrant planetoids, rocks, and dust circling the Galaxy as well.
I am not sure the term ‘free-floating’ is appropriate to describe objects that are not in closed planetary orbit around any individual star.
I vote for “planetars”.
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