Rogue Worlds Throw Planetary Ideas Out of Orbit
quantamagazine.org
quantamagazine.org
> Rather than answering this question, the JWST observation adds to the mystery: The telescope’s infrared eye found that dozens of the worlds appear to be in pairs orbiting each other — a puzzling arrangement that, if confirmed, would defy expectations.
> “We’re missing something,” said Nienke van der Marel, a researcher who studies planet formation at Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands, “and we don’t know what it is.”
> These improbable duos cannot be easily explained by any known formation theories of either stars or free-floating planets. But within a week of the JWST announcement, researchers published a daring new idea describing how giant planets might be ejected from their home system in pairs — an event most researchers had thought all but impossible. Whether or not the proposal can fully account for the entire zoo of dim, starless worlds remains to be seen.
Here's my scifi take on things: these pairworlds are engineered.
The whole "the galaxy should be settled by now" question has an answer: the galaxy is settled, but the people living there don't care to live close to suns - they prefer to live in planetary binaries sailing through the interstellar void, using the gravitational energy of the orbit to keep the cores of the planets in flux, generating internal heat for energy.
My understanding from the article is that these are mostly gas-giant, Jupiter-like pairs - so maybe these creatures live in those types of planets' atmospheres, and have developed the technology to pair up gas giant worlds and go traveling.
Maybe that's how most sentient life does it! Maybe we're half a million years away from our local Gas Giant Natives packing up their shit (Jupiter & Saturn, Neptune & Uranus) and fucking off to join the greater galactic community, leaving us in the dust to be clobbered by asteroids and other orbital disasters.
- Because they're aliens, with different modes of thought! (But that's not very satisfying.)
- Maybe they're long-lived enough and live slowly enough to consider stars more of a hazard than a useful resource to live next to - those things go nova, put out lots of dangerous radiation and flares, many of them turn into gas giants and incinerate any nearby planets, and they attract others to the neighborhood. Maybe it's better to live a quiet, hard-to-detect life, slowly cruising through galactic space.
- Maybe that's the environment they originally evolved in, and living near a star would be as alien and uncomfortable for them as living on a gas giant slowly floating through space would be for us.
Would make a great novel.
A majority of star systems (iirc) are binary star systems.
Why wouldn't failed stars / rogue planets similarly follow that pattern?
If there are a lot of massive objects out there (rogue planets, maybe primordial black holes) then these could be used to aid acceleration and deceleration through gravity assist and the Oberth effect. (The latter describes how you get more acceleration thrusting near a massive body.)
You could fly along with an ultra sensitive gravity telescope / sensor and hop between massive objects.
You could also perhaps harvest propellant from some of these.
Long duration interstellar flight would be easier if the space between solar systems was not as empty as we think.
edit: I did the most basic possible amount of research by reading the first paragraph of the wikipedia article (can we call that a milliHbomberguy?), and you're right, you do gain more velocity than just firing your engine in space. Although it puts a limit on where you'll be going after your approach.
An Oberth effect flyby of a primordial black hole with a high impulse drive like nuclear pulse propulsion would be pretty spicy. It’s a feasible way to achieve speeds close to the speed of light. Acceleration would kill you though.
If we did find such an object anywhere within a few light years of the sun it would be a way to send probes out at significant fractions of the speed of light.
Rocky planets can only form in proto disks around newly forming stars. Heavier materials (carbon and up) are concentrated this way.
> “We know there’s a whole bunch of crap between stars,” Raymond said
If they are using laser communication, our Sun will likely drown any signals in noise.
One of the key questions for life is where all the external energy to overcome entropy comes from. Being close to a star without being fried by it is a good way to accomplish this, but there are fewer easy energy sources on a rogue planet.
How so? The gravity well of a gas/ice giant would be absolutely massive. Even if you could get away from the planet, waiting for a flyby in interstellar space could well take millions of years between encounters.