Loner Planets
Astronomers have found a new class of vagabond planets. These Jupiter-sized planets are loners "floating in the dark of space, away from the light of a star." According to the NASA-funded team, these roaming worlds were most likely ejected during the developing years of a planetary system.Up until recently these isolated orbs have been difficult to spot making their existence only speculative, but with advancements in observational technology, the joint Japan-New Zealand effort was finally able to detect them by the warping of light due to a passing celestial body's gravity. Now that they have finally been spotted, the team esitmates that there could be more, about twice as many of them as stars, and "are thought to be at least as common as planets that orbit stars adding "up to hundreds of billions of lone planets in our Milky Way galaxy alone."
The survey conducted as "the Microlensing Observations in Astrophysics," or MOA, "named in part after a giant wingless, extinct bird family from New Zealand," was not sensitive enough to detect lower-mass planets like Earth, but the team believes that these should be much more common because they should be ejected by stars more often.
These were not the first free-floating, planet-like structures to be detected. Previously there has been observations of those with masses three times that of Jupiter, and these became known as brown dwarfs, and although they emit dim light, they lack the mass like a star to ignite their nuclear fuel. But these new wanderers appear to have been ejected during very turbulant years of forming galaxies due to the close proximity with other gravitational influences from planets and stars. Once settled, these planets fall into stable gravitational orbits around the galaxy's center.
Image: "Free-Floating Planets May be More Common than Stars" by NASAblueshift on Flickr courtesy of Creative Commons Licensing.Tweet
- 5-26-11
- Chris Kaplan's blog
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Sphere gazing...
These Sunless planets must be the hermit sages of the great void. Around the galaxies center, free from solar domination and the samsara of the spheres. The black hole at the center of the spiral is the true center of creation.
Back on Earth, its interesting that we are bombarded at all time by miniblack holes: http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-05-mini-black-holes-atoms-earth.html
"Similar to how electrons orbit an atomic nucleus without collapsing inward, mini black holes below a certain mass may cause surrounding matter to orbit without falling into the black hole."
This is interesting in how it relates to time, synchonicity, and causality. These black holes they don't just pull matter into coherence, they pull energy, they are dwell points, strange attractors which are the invisible centers we only know through their peripheral manifestations.
The infinite complexity results in events and occurances, history and technology, people and places, planets and suns, all come into being according to these hidden void potentialities. Deliniated cosmic laws from the root of all phenomenon; resonant order through all paradigms. Tapped through the ages by shamans and sages, visionaries and heretics.
What is the minds reflection? Magic isn't done in the light of the sun. The sun is Will, the sun is self. Its a relative truth and a definite and apparent one. Its power is visible all around us and we are blessed by its heat and light, the gift of life
Hidden chaotic law, the vacuum aggragates act on the Earth, are the fractaline formations of the clouds, the tortional vortexes of the oceans; the chance anomolies and accidental happenstances which punctuate the evolutionary equilibrium of our species.
The closer we get to the galactic center, the more pervasive and realized its influence becomes. Low lying clouds fog the view, eventually they become dense enough to create water droplets, those droplets fill oceans, and they ebb and flow with the spell of the moon.