{"id":134088,"date":"2022-01-15T12:42:32","date_gmt":"2022-01-15T20:42:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2022\/01\/rogue-planets-how-wandering-bodies-in-interstellar-space-ended-up-on-their-own"},"modified":"2022-01-15T12:42:32","modified_gmt":"2022-01-15T20:42:32","slug":"rogue-planets-how-wandering-bodies-in-interstellar-space-ended-up-on-their-own","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2022\/01\/rogue-planets-how-wandering-bodies-in-interstellar-space-ended-up-on-their-own","title":{"rendered":"Rogue planets: How wandering bodies in interstellar space ended up on their own"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/rogue-planets-how-wandering-bodies-in-interstellar-space-ended-up-on-their-own2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>We now know of almost 5,000 planets outside the Solar System. If you were to picture what it would be like on one of these distant worlds, or exoplanets, your mental image would probably include a parent star\u2014or more than one, especially if you\u2019re a Star Wars fan.<\/p>\n<p>But scientists have <a href=\"https:\/\/www.eso.org\/public\/archives\/releases\/sciencepapers\/eso2120\/eso2120a_en.pdf\">recently discovered<\/a> that more <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/planets\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">planets<\/a> than we thought are floating through space all by themselves\u2014unlit by a friendly stellar companion. These are icy \u201cfree-floating planets,\u201d or FFPs. But how did they end up all on their own and what can they tell us about how such planets form?<\/p>\n<p>Finding more and more exoplanets to study has, as we might have expected, widened our understanding of what a planet is. In particular, the line between planets and \u201cbrown dwarfs\u201d\u2014 <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/cool+stars\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">cool stars<\/a> that can\u2019t fuse hydrogen like other <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/stars\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">stars <\/a>\u2014has become increasingly blurred. What dictates whether an object is a planet or a brown dwarf has long been the subject of debate\u2014is it a question of mass? Do objects cease to be planets if they are undergoing nuclear fusion? Or is the way in which the object was formed most important?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>We now know of almost 5,000 planets outside the Solar System. If you were to picture what it would be like on one of these distant worlds, or exoplanets, your mental image would probably include a parent star\u2014or more than one, especially if you\u2019re a Star Wars fan. But scientists have recently discovered that more [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":396,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-134088","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/134088","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/396"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=134088"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/134088\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=134088"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=134088"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=134088"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}