Rogue Planets: The Worlds Drifting Through the Galaxy in Complete Darkness

We’re also live on Spotify 🎧 https://open.spotify.com/show/033Dogu... What happens to a planet that gets violently ejected from its solar system and left to drift through the galaxy with no star, no orbit, and no sunlight? Tonight, we explore rogue planets, free-floating worlds wandering the Milky Way in complete darkness, outnumbering the stars themselves. Recent discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope in the Orion Nebula and infrared surveys of the Upper Scorpius association have revealed that rogue planets are far more common than anyone expected. Microlensing surveys suggest hundreds of billions, possibly trillions, of these invisible worlds are drifting between the stars right now. But how do planets get thrown out of their systems in the first place? How do astronomers detect objects that produce almost no light? And what are conditions actually like on a world with no sun, surviving on nothing but its own fading internal heat? From the violence of ejection to the silence of the void, this is the full story of the galaxy's hidden majority. Sources: Sumi, T. et al. (2011). Unbound or Distant Planetary Mass Population Detected by Gravitational Microlensing. Nature, 473, 349-352. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature10092 Miret-Roig, N. et al. (2022). A Rich Population of Free-Floating Planets in the Upper Scorpius Young Stellar Association. Nature Astronomy, 6, 89-97. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-021-01... Pearson, S. G. and McCaughrean, M. J. (2023). Jupiter Mass Binary Objects in the Trapezium Cluster. arXiv:2310.01231 [European Southern Observatory / James Webb Space Telescope survey of the Orion Nebula]. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2310.0... Stevenson, D. J. (1999). Life-Sustaining Planets in Interstellar Space? Nature, 400, 32. https://doi.org/10.1038/21811 Mróz, P. et al. (2017). No Large Population of Unbound or Wide-Orbit Jupiter-Mass Planets. Nature, 548, 183-186. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature23276 #RoguePlanets #Space #Astronomy #JamesWebbSpaceTelescope #MilkyWay #PlanetaryScience #Astrophysics