Most rogue planets are likely frozen worlds
Shutterstock/Artsiom P
Imagine a world where it’s always night all day, all year round. In fact, because there is no sun, there is no day or year. This means that there is no solar cycle to mark the passage of time. And even if there are moons, they are hardly visible. Because this is a lonely world floating in interstellar space.
As is known, rogue planets exist, and there are probably many of them.they could do Outnumber stars by up to 20 timesAccording to a 2023 analysis by david bennett That means there are probably trillions of astronauts in our galaxy alone, say NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland and its colleagues.
This may seem like a ridiculously large number, given that we tend to think of planets orbiting stars. However, the existence of free-floating planets is completely consistent with planet formation theory. “Honestly, I wasn’t surprised to learn that there may be more rogue planets than stars,” he says. gavin coleman at Queen Mary University of London.
But that doesn’t mean astronomers aren’t awed by the prospect. “It’s a beautiful thing to imagine,” says Lisa Kaltenegger of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. “Billions of planets no longer have a home and are basically just traveling through the galaxy.”
We cannot see the rogue planet directly. Since the first candidates were discovered in 2012, we have inferred their existence by the way they bend light coming from other places.
