The human race is a fatalist cult at times, often dabbling in our own doom for reasons that can only be described as mental entertainment.
We watch horror movies. We chase tornadoes. We click on links that show us the destructive power of the unemotional world around us because it excites something deep within our brains.
And, of course, we come up with all sorts of ways in which we believe the world could end.
One of the wildest tales that we had concocted for ourselves spoke of a “rogue” planet called Nibiru, which has no orbital path whatsoever, careening into our solar system and allowing its own gravity to completely disrupt Earth’s orbit.
This has long been considered a far-out theory, but news out of the world of astronomy this week could change that.
Data gathered by NASA’s now-retired Kepler Space Telescope has revealed a small population of free-floating planets near the Galactic Bulge. The new finding raises hope that a pair of upcoming missions will result in further detections of unbound planets, which drift through space separated from their home stars.
The Kepler mission ended in 2018, but its legacy continues to unfold. During its nearly 10 years of service, the famous space telescope managed to detect at least 2,245 exoplanets, with thousands yet to be confirmed. We can now add four new candidate planets to the list, but these aren’t of the typical variety. They’re unbound, meaning they’re not in orbit around any star.
Rogue planets, as they’re informally known, likely formed from a protoplanetary disc around a host star but were then tossed out into interstellar space by the gravitational perturbations of larger planets. These wanderers range in size from Earth-like through to Jupiter-scale behemoths. Fascinatingly, they might be exceptionally abundant, with some scientists estimating trillions of them in the Milky Way. Their true population size remains a mystery, however.
Scientists are now suggesting that they’ll need to point their space telescopes in this garner direction more often now that they’ve discovered the best way to see these things.
