{"id":32906,"date":"2019-11-06T00:54:09","date_gmt":"2019-11-05T19:24:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/yaabot.com\/?p=32906"},"modified":"2024-01-10T23:51:07","modified_gmt":"2024-01-10T18:21:07","slug":"what-are-rogue-planets-beginners-guide","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/entropymag.co\/what-are-rogue-planets-beginners-guide\/","title":{"rendered":"What Are Rogue Planets? A Beginner\u2019s Guide"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
We think of planets as spheres of huge masses revolving around a star like our very own Earth. In fact, we were all taught that all planets have a sun<\/em>. Together the sun and the planets form a nice orderly place called the solar system. So what is all this talk about rogue planets? <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Rogue planets are no ordinary planets. To put it in the simplest of terms, they do not follow one of the largely accepted conventions of planet-hood, which involves revolving around a star. Rogue planets are completely free of an elliptical orbit around a host star caused by its gravitational force. In other words, they are huge planetary mass objects which have somehow been pulled apart from the planetary system they were once a part of, or were never gravitationally bound to a star in the first place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We discovered these planets quite recently, about 25 years ago<\/a>; so it is a relatively novel concept and there is quite a lot we may not know yet. For instance, determining how many of these rogue planets are out there is no easy task for us. Researchers from Stanford University estimate that the number of rogue planets could outnumber stars by as much as 100,000 to 1<\/a>. In 2019, Simon Portegies Zwart, a University of Leiden astronomer in Netherlands estimated about 50 billion rogue planets in the Milky Way alone<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Helping us with the precision of these estimates will be NASA’s James Webb Telescope, which is expected to mount a search for rogue planets<\/a> too. These themselves do not give off any light and since they are not gravitationally bound to a host star, they do not always have a light to reflect.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Scientists have worked out alternate options to detect rogue planets in the meantime. One method, using which we detected two of them in 2018, involved observing the manner in which light coming from behind a planet bent because of its gravity. Recent surveys have hinted towards an existence of about 100-200 Jupiter-sized rogue planets hurtling through space.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So while we wait for our able astronomers to find out more about these intriguing objects, let’s look at what we do know.<\/p>\n\n\n\nWhat are Rogue Planets?<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n