Why Rogue Planets Are the Most Terrifying Objects скачать в хорошем качестве

Why Rogue Planets Are the Most Terrifying Objects

sunlight, cycling through predictable days and seasons. Comfortable. Familiar. Safe. But most planets in our galaxy don't look anything like that. They don't orbit stars at all. They drift through interstellar space alone, untethered to any sun, wandering through absolute darkness. These are rogue planets, also called free-floating planets. And according to recent research, they vastly outnumber the planets we can actually see. The numbers are staggering. Current estimates suggest there are approximately twenty rogue planets for every star in the Milky Way. Our galaxy contains somewhere between one hundred billion and four hundred billion stars. If we use two hundred billion as a reasonable middle estimate, that means roughly four trillion rogue planets are wandering through our galaxy right now. Some estimates go even higher, suggesting there could be a quadrillion of them, that's ten to the fifteenth power. For comparison, astronomers have confirmed only about six thousand exoplanets total so far. The universe could be teeming with rogue planets and we wouldn't even know it. Most planets in the cosmos are orphans without parent stars. We couldn't see them until very recently because rogue planets are essentially invisible. They don't shine like stars. They have no starlight to reflect. Many are extremely cold, emitting so little infrared heat that even our best infrared telescopes can't spot them. The only way to detect these dark wanderers is through gravitational microlensing. When a rogue planet passes in front of a more distant star from our vantage point, the planet's gravity bends and focuses the starlight like a lens. The star temporarily appears brighter for anywhere from a few hours to a couple of days. Then the effect ends. The microlensing event is gone forever. It never repeats. This makes rogue planets incredibly difficult to observe from Earth.