From Astronomy magazine April 2021:
“…sometimes individual planets gain velocity and are flung far out into space, escaping their galactic disks.” Page 5 and pages 18-23.
We know of the existence of planetary rogues as well as rogue asteroids, comets, and even stars.
Objects in space may be classified and understood as Rogues based on their speed and trajectories.
One such object, 2I/Borisov, has been clocked at 20 miles (32 kilometers) per second. It’s trajectory tells us it is from somewhere else and on it’s way to somewhere else.
The article postulates several possible causes for Rogues as well as many different types of rogues. Google ploonets and blanets.
Proposed: Let’s brainstorm a bit about the role these rogues might play in a well written story.
What might we learn from a rogue if we could study one up close? Could one contain a Pompeiian like trove of artifacts revealing life from a far distant realm? How might a closer observation be possible? What if a far distant world put a history of that world on a rogue that we could recover somehow?
Leave your initial thoughts or add some research to be read and responded to.
Contribute and collaborate! Our thoughts are ours alone; but if we do share them, they could develop into one or more fine science fiction stories. If you start such a story, let us know about it.
WinLoseorDraw
“The Wandering Earth” is a movie based on the novel by Liu Cixin, in which hundreds of giant engines are built to push Earth out and away from the expanding sun.
If a planet with the same momentum as ours crashes head-on into Earth, both will melt and together the combined mass will fall into the sun.
If a rogue planet passes nearby but does not collide, it will change our orbit. As it nears, we could send characters–human or sentient robots–to land, analyze, and transmit data. The planet would pass through our solar system.
Or not, what if it approaches in a way that leads to Earth-Moon having another planet orbiting each other which would change our orbit around the sun but suppose it leaves us in the habitable zone with a new neighbor where its oceans are melting.
Thanks Jim:
Here some other contributions to the Rogue topic that were sent in on Chess.com:
Oldwoof’s reply to Rogues:
This scenario has appeared several times on film and TV series. UK TV is rerunning the Jerry Anderson series Space 1999. Basically our Moon becoming a rogue. Also I remember the film ‘When two Worlds Collide’.
We think of our own solar system as a stable environment but there is very good evidence that Jupiter once set off on a road trip all of its own. In the process it knocked Saturn sideways, and it still is.
It is also known that even faint heat from a star will heat the side of a rock facing it. That heat causes emissions that can give that rock a very gentle push. Over enough time that can make its orbit unstable and off it goes. More violent events can affect larger objects. Jupiter has enormous gravity, so much so that during their orbits, some of its moons are squeezed so hard that even today they are violently volcanic.
Then there is dark matter. We don’t know what it is or even if it really exists, but we are pretty sure there is something that has mass we can’t detect. I remember some years ago a container full of small toy plastic ducks, fell off a ship. Those ducks turned up all over the world. Why didn’t they all go roughly the same way? Basically because even very small and very local events can cause dramatically different results over time.
This doesn’t mean that there is no intelligence at work, but it is not an indication that there is. We just have to keep looking and trying to improve our understanding.
One of the more interesting and puzzling aspects of rogues (as pointed out above) is that something has to cause them to accelerate or they would not escape their gravitational orbits in the first place.
Jesters-script added these videos and links. The first two are Neil deGrasse Tyson. Very interesting!
The bit in the second video suggesting that rogues might have internal energy sources is especially fascinating.
https://youtu.be/DhTVqyzLDYc
https://youtu.be/kKi58i0YD0Y
https://youtu.be/ItYcRd1_Q5s
https://youtu.be/mgZqBiJtRZ4
https://phys.org/news/2015-08-stars-rogue.html
https://www.eso.org/public/news/eso2120/#:~:text=By%20studying%20the%20newly%20found,out%20from%20their%20parent%20system
This morning I (WinLoseorDraw) started a one-person brainstorm of a story involving Rogues. I will keep you posted.
Here is a summary of the article
The Galaxy’s Marvelous Rogues and Misfits
:
In 1996 Hubble first detected stars where they shouldn’t be according to cosmology of the time, stars roaming free of the gravitational system of any galaxy. Since then, astronomers have documented a dozen potential rogue planets, two interstellar objects, and hundreds of rogue stars streaking towards the next nearest galaxy, Andromeda.
The two interstellar objects, 1I/2017 U1 (Oumuamua) and 2I/Borisov, were the first known visitors from beyond our solar system. These objects are space travelers no longer bound by a gravitational system. It has been proposed that Oumuamua may be a hydrogen iceberg, interstellar molecular hydrogen ice (H2). Borisov appears to be a wandering comet.
These objects are hard to find because they do not emit light. They can only be tracked when they pass in between us and a star. When that happens the light from the star is bent and magnified. The larger the object, the longer the duration of this optical signature, a few minutes to several days. Astronomers call this gravitational microlensing. They are only now beginning to be observed because of the advent of new observatories (the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile) and space telescopes (Nancy Grace Roman, planned by NASA for later this decade.
There is more than one plausible explanation as to how these rogue objects were set free to wander the universe. One is they became marooned from their home star when it turned into a red giant. Another is that a second passing star ripped them away from their home star. A third explanation is that competing gravitational pulls in a binary star system may have caused them. A fourth idea is that they may be expired brown dwarf stars. A fifth possibility is that they may be debris formed when distant galaxies collided.
These objects will certainly come in many different varieties, ploonets or orphaned moons, or blanets, orphaned planets.