The website is very user-friendly
The website is easy to use. Thank you to Trade Coffee for supporting this episode of SciShow. You can get a free bag of coffee with any subscription purchase.
When we think of planets, we often imagine them basking in the light of a nearby star. But it turns out, most planets don’t actually orbit stars – they’re incredibly difficult to find. In the past decade, astronomers have been learning just how abundant these free-floating planets, also known as rogue planets, are.
So how do you make a rogue planet? Astronomers have identified a few ways it can happen, and some of them may require stretching our current definition of what a planet is. The first is the standard planetary formation story, where a baby star forms and is surrounded by a disc of gas, dust, rock, and ice. Thanks to gravity and a series of dramatic collisions, some of that debris condenses into bodies large enough for astronomers to deem them planets. But gravity can also be responsible for making some of these new worlds go rogue. It could be a planetary sibling or a random star just passing by, but if something big gets too close, it can gravitationally tug on a planet and knock it out of its system.
The second way is called core collapse, which is when a blob of dust and gas floating in the middle of cosmic nowhere has enough mass that gravity just squishes it down to form a planet. The third way is when a star is trying to form, but something interrupts the process. Maybe a bunch of bodies in a stellar nursery do their own gravitational jostling and kick one out before it grows big enough, or maybe the energetic stellar wind shooting out of one star blows away a bunch of gas that another had worked hard to accumulate.
While we know how rogue planets can form, we don’t actually know which is the most or least common. It’s also hard to find rogue planets, as the most common planet-finding techniques kind of require there to be a star. If all goes to plan, it’s going to be as much of a big deal for exoplanet research as the web is for infrared research. Roman comes equipped with a wide field instrument that’s just as sensitive as Hubble’s, but the field of view is a hundred times bigger. Astronomers expect Roman to provide a rogue planet count that’s at least 10 times more precise than our current one. Eventually, we may learn that the number of rogues is closer to eight per star than a whopping 44, but whatever it ends up being, experts believe they’ll outnumber bound worlds and one day they might actually be able to answer why rogues are more abundant.
But we don’t have to wait for that answer to ponder an even more important question: what does this mean for us? From a scientific perspective, the revelation that your average planet isn’t orbiting one of the oodles and oodles of stars out there suggests that stellar system formation might be even more melodramatic and complicated than astronomers expected, and it poses some great follow-up questions too, like did Earth lose a whole bunch of siblings that we could find if we looked hard enough, or is there some way that these rogue worlds could be habitable for some kind of alien critter? Or, if it turns out most of the planet-sized balls in our galaxy never orbited a star in the first place, do we have to sit through yet another round of astronomers redefining what a planet is?
But maybe it’s more interesting to think of what this shift in our understanding means to humanity. While we’ll never go back to being the center of the universe, scientists have become more and more convinced that our solar system is odd, and now not only is our solar system a little funky, but stellar systems might be a little funky themselves. So keep that in mind the next time you’re pondering your place in the universe.
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Here at the SciShow office, we tried their Milk and Honey blend, which is made specifically to taste good with milk, although it also tasted good without it. It’s an aromatic dark roast and it’s just a classic cup of coffee. And it came in an easily resealable bag, which I personally am a huge fan of.
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