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Comment by apotatopot | Hacker News Reader

Some of the stuff being announced about space seems to me like scientists restating stuff we should've known 50 years ago. Like, our star has more than 2 planets around it. If that's the case with lots of stars, then it's obvious there would be of a higher number of planets going "rogue".

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Well, science doesn't really operate by assuming what the truth is. If it did it wouldn't be science.

And if it's so obvious that we should've known this 50 years ago, you could've gone down in history as the scientist who discovered this truth. But instead you're complaining on the internet about other people trying to prove it.

Actually, informed guesses make a lot of sense when we have limited data. Science doesn't operate by assuming that we know nothing outside of what we have evidence for. That wouldn't be logical at all. That being said, it is of course interesting and valuable to confirm our hypotheses.

We first detected exoplanets in 1992 (that was for a planet orbitig a neutron star, for one orbiting a "vanilla" star it was 1995). So until 25-30 years ago, we had NO data on the frequency of exoplanets. Exoplanet hunting really only hit its stride in the 2010s.

Things have become a lot clearer in the last couple of decades. I guess it's easy to take our current knowledge for granted.

> An upcoming NASA mission could find that there are more rogue planets — planets that float in space without orbiting a sun — than there are stars in the Milky Way, a new study theorizes.

I don't think we've detected a single rogue planet, so this theory would seem novel to me.

It’s difficult because they generally do not radiate EM waves or specifically visible light.

There's at least one candidate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CFBDSIR_2149%E2%88%920403

(edit) Linked from the same article, a confirmed rogue planet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PSO_J318.5%E2%88%9222

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