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Woops! Eve has escaped it seems...

MickG

By MickG
in Science & Spaceflight

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kiwi1960

kiwi1960

Posted
Posted

Nice find, but I wonder... I wonder if there is such a thing as micro stars... a sun about the size of a largish coin but with the gravity pull of a normal sun???

Just because we cannot see a sun doesn't mean it doesn't have one... yes, I know they can determine a planet without a star by other means, but those other means takes time.... they spent the time on this little planet and found it wasn't going in an orbit... so.....

and little???? sheesh! I'd hate to see BIG!

(and yes, they probably can detect a sun that small because of the radiation... come on... work with me here... gimmie some slack!)

:)

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Ralathon

Ralathon

Posted
Posted
Nice find, but I wonder... I wonder if there is such a thing as micro stars... a sun about the size of a largish coin but with the gravity pull of a normal sun???

Just because we cannot see a sun doesn't mean it doesn't have one... yes, I know they can determine a planet without a star by other means, but those other means takes time.... they spent the time on this little planet and found it wasn't going in an orbit... so.....

and little???? sheesh! I'd hate to see BIG!

(and yes, they probably can detect a sun that small because of the radiation... come on... work with me here... gimmie some slack!)

:)

A star like that would have such an immense density it'd be a black hole. If you're willing to class black holes as stars they'd exist.

Also, six times the mass of jupiter wouldn't exactly be a small planet :P, closer to a tiny brown dwarf

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Garek

Garek

Posted
Posted
Really though, is there such thing as free floating in space?

Afaik, No matter where, You will always be orbiting something.

You can't be free floating in an absolute sense. But that planet has no sun, so it's kind of 'free floating' if you focus on nearby star systems and ignore the fact that they all together with us orbit the galactic center.

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Epthelyn

Epthelyn

Posted
Posted
Thats incredible, Didn't know planets could do that.

Really though, is there such thing as free floating in space?

Afaik, No matter where, You will always be orbiting something.

Just scale up an asteroid. It's pretty much the same thing; a big ball of rock flying around randomly in space, just potentially with an atmosphere and/or made of gas.

I think a free floating planet would be considered as a planet which is not in orbit around a star. It is true that an object will always be in orbit around something (assuming it's not at escape velocity for every SoI in the entire universe) but that focus could be anything (e.g. the centre of the galaxy, around which all stars rotate). However, such an object would be unlikely to maintain a stable orbit due to the gravitation effects of the billions of other larger objects (read: Stars) so it might as well be free floating, or you could think of it as pinball where the things you hit are slightly magnetic.

In other words, Yay! It's a floating planet!

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Technical Ben

Technical Ben

Posted
Posted
Nice find, but I wonder... I wonder if there is such a thing as micro stars... a sun about the size of a largish coin but with the gravity pull of a normal sun???

Just because we cannot see a sun doesn't mean it doesn't have one... yes, I know they can determine a planet without a star by other means, but those other means takes time.... they spent the time on this little planet and found it wasn't going in an orbit... so.....

and little???? sheesh! I'd hate to see BIG!

(and yes, they probably can detect a sun that small because of the radiation... come on... work with me here... gimmie some slack!)

:)

We can check if it orbits. If it does not orbit, there is not even an "invisible" sun.

It's practically a brown dwarf, which is practically a sun. ;)

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Arbolus

Arbolus

Posted
Posted
Thats incredible, Didn't know planets could do that.

Really though, is there such thing as free floating in space?

Afaik, No matter where, You will always be orbiting something.

It'll be orbiting the galactic centre. But one orbit will take so long (~100,000,000 years) that for all intents and purposes we can treat the planet as free-floating.

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Corw

Corw

Posted
Posted
I liked this bit:

"...has a mass only six times that of Jupiter"

Only? Surely a planet that is six times as heavy as Jupiter is a pretty damn big planet?

We have problems finding planet sized stuff so it is a big deal that we have found something "only" that big.

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lazarus1024

lazarus1024

Posted
Posted
A star like that would have such an immense density it'd be a black hole. If you're willing to class black holes as stars they'd exist.

Also, six times the mass of jupiter wouldn't exactly be a small planet :P, closer to a tiny brown dwarf

Still a planet. A brown dwarf is large enough to fuse/have fused Deuterium, but small enough that hydrogen-hydrogen fusion is impossible. I forget the exact limits, but that is something on the order of 10-12 Jovian masses up to around 30 or so Jovian masses. Below that an no Deuterium Fusion, above that and it becomes a red dwarf as hydrogen-hydrogen fusion occurs.

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SpaceSphereOfDeath

SpaceSphereOfDeath

Posted
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This may of happen in our solar system, don't take this as fact at the current moment it's just a hypothesis,

A 9th PLANET may have been ejected from our system at the same time Saturn and Jupiter got locked in a 2:3 orbital resonance and Uranus and Neptune switching places wouldn't have helped.

Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypothetical_fifth_gas_giant

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lajoswinkler

lajoswinkler

Posted
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I liked this bit:

"...has a mass only six times that of Jupiter"

Only? Surely a planet that is six times as heavy as Jupiter is a pretty damn big planet?

No, size doesn't increase in a linear fashion. It might be the same size as Jupiter.

This is probably a failed star. These objects are probably extremely abundant in the universe, but are hard to detect for obvious reasons.

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