A trillion rogue planets and not one sun to shine on them
July 24, 2024 10:25 PM Subscribe
Inside the race to track down our galaxy’s hidden, untethered worlds. "Not only do rogue planets outnumber visible stars, they probably also outnumber conventional planets like Earth, the ones that orbit their own suns and bask happily in their warmth. If anything, worlds like ours are the outliers. The tremendous abundance of the rogues implies that the process of planet formation is extremely messy, with many worlds getting kicked into the void almost as soon as they take shape. Lots of potentially habitable planets probably end up cold and desolate as a result. Then again, some exobiologists, who search for life outside Earth, speculate that certain types of rogue planets could become roving ambassadors, ferrying life across interstellar space."
Yeah, this is a good article for everyone. No special knowledge is needed to understand and enjoy it. (But engineers will like it.)
The problem they face in their search:
The problem they face in their search:
The discovery of free-floating, rogue planets also highlights how technology is enabling us to see into previously hidden parts of the universe. These objects emit no light and cast no shadows. They are impossible to observe directly, notes astronomer and planet hunter Scott Gaudi of Ohio State University. Scientists can only “feel” them by the way their gravity bends light. The gravitational pull of a planet can act as a magnifying glass, briefly amplifying the light from more distant stars, as happened with OGLE-2016-BLG-1928. This phenomenon, called gravitational microlensing, is tricky to detect but uniquely revealing. “There’s no way we would know these planets were there except for microlensing—it’s the only way to do it,” Gaudi says.How they search:
The OGLE, MOA, and KMTnet teams converged on a technique for detecting these rare events. They aim their telescopes toward the constellation Sagittarius, which happens to lie in the direction of the dense center of our galaxy—the galactic bulge—where about 400 million detectable stars are packed tightly together. Then they wait, as the orbital motion of objects within the Milky Way causes planets and stars and everything else to drift by. And they watch for any telltale changes in the brightness of one star among the multitude due to a planet passing in front of it, briefly magnifying its light.Upcoming tool for the job:
The dream tool for exploring free-floating planets would be a telescope that watches the galactic bulge from space, where the views are crystal clear; observes stars in infrared light, which pierces through the interstellar dust in our galaxy; has a wide field of view, to take in millions of stars at once; and attentively measures the brightness of the stars for long periods of time, to make sure we don’t miss any fleeting microlensing events caused by passing rogue planets. It’s quite a wish list. The Hubble Space Telescope, launched in 1990, is hopeless for rapid observations in the infrared. JWST, like most of today’s most powerful observatories, is designed to look narrow and deep, which is terrible for a large-scale survey.posted by pracowity at 1:27 AM on July 25 [2 favorites]
The upcoming Roman Space Telescope, on the other hand, ticks all the boxes. “It is just an ideal machine to detect very low-mass free-floating planets,” Gaudi says.
a telescope that watches the galactic bulge from space
so astronomers are tiring of Uranus?
[sorry, this is totally fascinating and I would rush to choose The tremendous abundance of the rogues as a username or at least a Banksian vessel]
posted by chavenet at 1:57 AM on July 25 [2 favorites]
so astronomers are tiring of Uranus?
[sorry, this is totally fascinating and I would rush to choose The tremendous abundance of the rogues as a username or at least a Banksian vessel]
posted by chavenet at 1:57 AM on July 25 [2 favorites]
Please don't hold all these YASDs against them. Planet: The Roguelike is a very addictive game.
posted by polytope subirb enby-of-piano-dice at 2:35 AM on July 25
posted by polytope subirb enby-of-piano-dice at 2:35 AM on July 25
Wow, I had no idea they'd detected rogue planets. That's an unbelievable level of finding a needle in a pitch black murmurating hay stack.
posted by lucidium at 3:35 AM on July 25 [4 favorites]
posted by lucidium at 3:35 AM on July 25 [4 favorites]
Just waiting for some Reddit D&D commenter to call them "rouge" planets.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 4:37 AM on July 25 [4 favorites]
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 4:37 AM on July 25 [4 favorites]
If there are so many of them, I think we are the rogue planet, hanging around our mom and siblings, instead if of running free through the galaxy.
posted by GenjiandProust at 4:39 AM on July 25 [1 favorite]
posted by GenjiandProust at 4:39 AM on July 25 [1 favorite]
Is there a sci-fi story where an entire planet, flung from a distant star, appears in our solar system? Perhaps with remnants of another civilization?
posted by vacapinta at 4:44 AM on July 25 [3 favorites]
posted by vacapinta at 4:44 AM on July 25 [3 favorites]
It could be the moon - they just haven't dug down enough yet to find the remnants.
posted by pracowity at 4:57 AM on July 25
posted by pracowity at 4:57 AM on July 25
after seeing melancholia just the phrase "rogue planet" fills me with dread. fascinating stuff here!
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 5:24 AM on July 25 [2 favorites]
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 5:24 AM on July 25 [2 favorites]
Aya Hirano, that's very likely already happened to us... just not in like, any sort of living memory.
posted by gc at 5:45 AM on July 25 [1 favorite]
posted by gc at 5:45 AM on July 25 [1 favorite]
‘Rogue’ seems a bit derogatory. What about ‘non-orbital’? ‘Uncaptured’, ‘Traveller’? ‘Free’?
posted by Phanx at 7:42 AM on July 25
posted by Phanx at 7:42 AM on July 25
Is there a sci-fi story where an entire planet, flung from a distant star, appears in our solar system
Yes, though the TV Tropes page is woefully deficient.
posted by Mitheral at 9:24 AM on July 25
Yes, though the TV Tropes page is woefully deficient.
posted by Mitheral at 9:24 AM on July 25
Excellent article. I remember reading an article in American Scientist c. 2005 on our understanding of how planetary systems evolve (based on modeling): they eject a lot of material.
I should get around to reading the 1965 Hugo-winning novel The Wanderer by Fritz Leiber. "The novel deals with a wandering planet that enters the Solar System. Its narrative follows multiple disconnected groups of characters to portray the widespread impact of the Wanderer on the entire population of the Earth (and above it) as well as the varied reactions of different groups as they struggle to cope and survive."
posted by neuron at 9:36 AM on July 25 [1 favorite]
I should get around to reading the 1965 Hugo-winning novel The Wanderer by Fritz Leiber. "The novel deals with a wandering planet that enters the Solar System. Its narrative follows multiple disconnected groups of characters to portray the widespread impact of the Wanderer on the entire population of the Earth (and above it) as well as the varied reactions of different groups as they struggle to cope and survive."
posted by neuron at 9:36 AM on July 25 [1 favorite]
pitch black murmurating hay stack might also make a nice name for a Banksian vessel, band or maybe album.
posted by supermedusa at 9:57 AM on July 25 [1 favorite]
posted by supermedusa at 9:57 AM on July 25 [1 favorite]
Is there a sci-fi story where an entire planet, flung from a distant star, appears in our solar system
Blindsight is one of the most often recommended books in the printsf subreddit, and is centered around a rogue planet close to the solar system.
(For some reason, it's not in the tvtropes page that Mitheral posted).
It's pretty good, but it's difficult to read at times, delves into the problem of understanding what consciousness is, and the author, Peter Watts, has a rather nihilistic view of the human condition. But I think you might find it interesting (I liked it a lot). The author even has the full text of the novel in his homepage.
posted by LaVidaEsUnCarnaval at 10:34 AM on July 25 [2 favorites]
Blindsight is one of the most often recommended books in the printsf subreddit, and is centered around a rogue planet close to the solar system.
(For some reason, it's not in the tvtropes page that Mitheral posted).
It's pretty good, but it's difficult to read at times, delves into the problem of understanding what consciousness is, and the author, Peter Watts, has a rather nihilistic view of the human condition. But I think you might find it interesting (I liked it a lot). The author even has the full text of the novel in his homepage.
posted by LaVidaEsUnCarnaval at 10:34 AM on July 25 [2 favorites]
"Is there a sci-fi story where an entire planet, flung from a distant star..."
First one I'm aware of is:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Star_Passes
[snip]
The Black Star Passes is a fixup of science fiction short stories by American author John W. Campbell Jr. It was first published in 1953
[snip]
Galaxy reviewer Groff Conklin described the stories as "three creaking classics . . . fun to read, [but] rococo antiques [without] believable characters, human relations, even logical plots."[2]
posted by aleph at 11:43 AM on July 25
First one I'm aware of is:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Star_Passes
[snip]
The Black Star Passes is a fixup of science fiction short stories by American author John W. Campbell Jr. It was first published in 1953
[snip]
Galaxy reviewer Groff Conklin described the stories as "three creaking classics . . . fun to read, [but] rococo antiques [without] believable characters, human relations, even logical plots."[2]
posted by aleph at 11:43 AM on July 25
If I understood, Big Ben was not "flung" from anywhere in Blindsight, but instead it's just a sub-brown dwarf that'd always sat like 0.5 light years-away.
We never noticed Big Ben because it's only 10 Jupiter masses, and thermonuclear fusion starts around 13 Jupiter masses, but it's large enough to keep itself fairly warm, like 8°C. We know the scramblers travelled to Big Ben from somewhere else, and did not evolve there, because of how their ship grows, etc. We've no idea how they found such a cold object so far out, maybe they came, checked us out first, and then looked for the nearest sub-brown dwarf to colonize.
Big Ben might not be considered a rogue planet per se, maybe it orbits our sun. Proxima Centauri orbits 0.21 light years away from Alpha Centauri AB, so almost half the distance to Big Ben. Alpha Centauri AB has twice our sun's mass, and Proxima Centauri has 12.2% of our suns mass, aka 13 times the mass of Big Ben, so they could orbit further away. I think Big Ben could just orbit our sun though.
posted by jeffburdges at 2:36 PM on July 25 [1 favorite]
We never noticed Big Ben because it's only 10 Jupiter masses, and thermonuclear fusion starts around 13 Jupiter masses, but it's large enough to keep itself fairly warm, like 8°C. We know the scramblers travelled to Big Ben from somewhere else, and did not evolve there, because of how their ship grows, etc. We've no idea how they found such a cold object so far out, maybe they came, checked us out first, and then looked for the nearest sub-brown dwarf to colonize.
Big Ben might not be considered a rogue planet per se, maybe it orbits our sun. Proxima Centauri orbits 0.21 light years away from Alpha Centauri AB, so almost half the distance to Big Ben. Alpha Centauri AB has twice our sun's mass, and Proxima Centauri has 12.2% of our suns mass, aka 13 times the mass of Big Ben, so they could orbit further away. I think Big Ben could just orbit our sun though.
posted by jeffburdges at 2:36 PM on July 25 [1 favorite]
Peter Watts: "My story needed something relatively local, large enough to sustain a superJovian magnetic field, but small and dim enough to plausibly avoid discovery for the next seventy or eighty years."
posted by jeffburdges at 2:42 PM on July 25
posted by jeffburdges at 2:42 PM on July 25
>>Is there a sci-fi story where an entire planet, flung from a distant star, appears in our solar system
>Yes, though the TV Tropes page is woefully deficient.
It does have my two favorites though: Junji Ito's Hellstar Remina and the Red Dwarf novelization Better Than Life (warning: spoilers in the TVT blurb)
posted by rifflesby at 5:58 PM on July 25
>Yes, though the TV Tropes page is woefully deficient.
It does have my two favorites though: Junji Ito's Hellstar Remina and the Red Dwarf novelization Better Than Life (warning: spoilers in the TVT blurb)
posted by rifflesby at 5:58 PM on July 25
Sci Fi: Perhaps an inversion of this theme, but there are the movies The Wandering Earth and its prequel in which humanity finds cause to turn the Earth into a rogue planet.
If we are permitted to stretch the scope a little further, there's the novel Dragon's Egg that involves a rogue neutron star and the civilization neutron-creatures thereupon -- a story that has somehow stuck in my head longer than most due to the observations about the speed of evolution on a neutron star (in the author's imagination).
Science: What really hit me about the possibility -- apparently true -- that the universe is chock full of rogue planets is that a fairly plausible scenario for the origin of life is deep down in the rocks, where chemolithoautotropes seem pretty happy here on Earth these days. So could life evolve on a rogue planet with no solar system and no sunlight? Maybe so. Somehow the universe feels different to me today.
Tying it all together is the possibility that, as gc mentioned, the Moon may have formed as a collision with a rogue planet... and that event may have kickstarted life. Admittedly, very speculative.
posted by brambleboy at 7:32 PM on July 25 [2 favorites]
If we are permitted to stretch the scope a little further, there's the novel Dragon's Egg that involves a rogue neutron star and the civilization neutron-creatures thereupon -- a story that has somehow stuck in my head longer than most due to the observations about the speed of evolution on a neutron star (in the author's imagination).
Science: What really hit me about the possibility -- apparently true -- that the universe is chock full of rogue planets is that a fairly plausible scenario for the origin of life is deep down in the rocks, where chemolithoautotropes seem pretty happy here on Earth these days. So could life evolve on a rogue planet with no solar system and no sunlight? Maybe so. Somehow the universe feels different to me today.
Tying it all together is the possibility that, as gc mentioned, the Moon may have formed as a collision with a rogue planet... and that event may have kickstarted life. Admittedly, very speculative.
posted by brambleboy at 7:32 PM on July 25 [2 favorites]
Interesting that the TVTropes page mentions the book version of When Worlds Collide but not the 1951 movie version.
posted by lhauser at 9:27 PM on July 25
posted by lhauser at 9:27 PM on July 25
I have seen the dark universe yawning,
Where the black planets roll without aim;
Where they roll in their horror unheeded, without knowledge or lustre or name.
posted by The otter lady at 10:45 AM on July 27 [2 favorites]
Where the black planets roll without aim;
Where they roll in their horror unheeded, without knowledge or lustre or name.
posted by The otter lady at 10:45 AM on July 27 [2 favorites]
Reddit's analysis of Nemesis by H.P. Lovecraft revealed that people sing this poem to Piano Man by Billy Joel:
- H.P Joelcraft by Julian Velard
- Irish ballad version by Daniel Kelly
posted by jeffburdges at 3:09 PM on July 28
- H.P Joelcraft by Julian Velard
- Irish ballad version by Daniel Kelly
posted by jeffburdges at 3:09 PM on July 28
>>Is there a sci-fi story where an entire planet, flung from a distant star, appears in our solar system
When Worlds Collide comes to mind. Which was based on a 1933 novel of the same title by Edwin Balmer and Philip Wylie on the same theme: rogue planet destroys life on Earth in passing but gets colonized by a select crew of plucky humans in a giant ark filled with the usual animal suspects. Very Noahesque The book series had two parts. As for a film version, not so much. Wikipedia says this:
When Worlds Collide comes to mind. Which was based on a 1933 novel of the same title by Edwin Balmer and Philip Wylie on the same theme: rogue planet destroys life on Earth in passing but gets colonized by a select crew of plucky humans in a giant ark filled with the usual animal suspects. Very Noahesque The book series had two parts. As for a film version, not so much. Wikipedia says this:
In the mid-1950s, George Pal considered producing a sequel to his 1951 film When Worlds Collide, which would likely have been based on this novel. However, the box office failure of Conquest of Space set back his career for the remainder of the decade and destroyed any chance of a sequel.posted by y2karl at 11:21 PM on August 21
I have seen the dark universe yawning,
Where the black planets roll without aim;
Where they roll in their horror unheeded, without knowledge or lustre or name.
whatever, Geoff Mack's already been there ...
posted by philip-random at 10:24 PM on August 24
Where the black planets roll without aim;
Where they roll in their horror unheeded, without knowledge or lustre or name.
whatever, Geoff Mack's already been there ...
posted by philip-random at 10:24 PM on August 24
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Just amazing thinking of these vast dark planets spin (or tumble - or is that only the intelligent ones like Oumuamua?) through darkspace. In their countless billions while we war, pillage and squabble. I really hope we can become interplanetary - and care for this one.
posted by unearthed at 1:13 AM on July 25 [1 favorite]