JWST Has Spotted Six Rogue Planets, Without a Star to Call Home - eviltoast
  • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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    3 months ago

    I know this is possibly the wrong forum to talk about it in but this is the form it was posted in so…

    There is some pretty good theories that suggest that the vast majority of planets are rogue planets. We just don’t really think about them because they’re hard to find. This fact is backed up by the fact that they’ve managed to just find six of them.

    A lot of this stems from the fact that stellar formation is massively chaotic and a lot of stuff gets ejected from the solar system as a result. Jupiter for example has collected an awful lot of moons, because of its intense gravity, but it will have also kicked an equal number of objects out of the solar system all together. Gas giants seem to be fairly common throughout the galaxy, so it’s fair to say It’s probably a ton of stuff out there that’s nowhere near a star.

    Surprisingly little sci-fi is set on rogue planets.