How many rogue planets and stars are there?

Daniel and Kelly answer a question from a listener about planets without stars and stars without galaxies.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:07):
You often hear that space is vast and mostly empty.
That's all true, but it gives you the impression that
our cosmic home is alone in the universe. But we're not.
We have a nice bright star to keep us warm
and push back the darkness, and other planets are there
to help protect us from interstellar interlopers. And our sun

(00:28):
is part of a massive swarm of stars in the
Milky Way, home to hundreds of billions of planetary cousins.
It's actually kind of a cozy cosmic neighborhood. But is
that true for all planets and stars? Could there be
planets existing outside of a solar system, floating in the
dark of space on their own, or could a star
form outside a galaxy? Could either of these be host

(00:50):
to life who would evolve and see a very different
view of the universe. Today On the pod will dive
into how planets and stars form and whether any or
many exist out there on their own. Welcome to Daniel
and Kelly's extraordinarily rogue Universe.

Speaker 2 (01:19):
Hi. I'm Kelly Winersmith. I study parasites and space.

Speaker 1 (01:23):
Hi I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and I like
to think of myself as a rogue scientist.

Speaker 2 (01:28):
Oh nice, I could think of myself as a rogue side.
I mean, you're like in academia and you're funded by
the Department of Defense or something, right, how are you
a rogue scientist?

Speaker 1 (01:37):
Excuse me? I have no Department of Defense or Department
of War funding at all. None of my research can
be used to kill people, Thank you very much.

Speaker 2 (01:44):
Sorry. Who is it that's given you like lifetime funding?
Is that the Department of Energy?

Speaker 1 (01:49):
There is no lifetime funding guarantee. But I have been
supported by the Department of Energy since I was ten
years old.

Speaker 2 (01:57):
Ten. Now, Daniel, you're brilliant. I have no doubt that
you could have started physics research at ten. But was
the Department of Energy funding your parents? I'm guessing yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1 (02:07):
Okay, they put food on the table since I was ten. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:10):
Nice.

Speaker 1 (02:11):
But my research direction is sort of off the beaten path,
within the larger confines of academia. So that's why I
think myself is a realgue scientist, and you must as well.
You're a pretty unusual character in your community, aren't you.

Speaker 2 (02:23):
Yes, I am, although like many scientists, I'm underpaid. So uh,
that's all right. I love what I do, I don't care.

Speaker 1 (02:32):
And all of us rogues come together to make a
cozy community of rogue sciences. Nobody is on their own,
and that's the topic of today's episode. Our cosmic community,
our cosmic neighborhood. Where are we in the universe? And
do we have neighbors in far flung, distant, dark reaches
of space.

Speaker 2 (02:49):
That's right, We're not alone, and thankfully for us, we're
kept company by the community of extraordinaries who share their
questions with us.

Speaker 1 (02:57):
We adore the adordinaries.

Speaker 2 (03:02):
I feel like we're stretching it a little bit.

Speaker 1 (03:05):
Well. We love hearing from all of you. We love
hearing what you are wondering about. We love being inspired
by your curiosity, and we love when you write to
us to ask us questions. And today we have an
episode inspired by a question from a listener. Here's Steve's question.

Speaker 3 (03:22):
Hi, Daniel and Kelly. I was looking at the stars
last night, and I know galaxies are full of stars,
but are there any stars not in a galaxy and
floating around by themselves? In that same vein, is there
a planet floating around without orbiting a sun? Thanks?

Speaker 2 (03:40):
Oh, rogue planets and suns. I love it. What a
great question, and please send us your questions at questions
at Daniel and Kelly dot org. We answer every emo
we get, and a subset of them will end up
getting answered on air.

Speaker 1 (03:54):
This is such a great question because you can hear
Steve wondering if we are weird in the universe, if
our situation is tip like, are all planets and stars
out there in galaxies like we are? Or are there
other situations? And this is exactly the kind of thinking
that breaks us out of the box and helps us
understand the universe, because in lots of situations we are typical,
and in lots of situations we are weird. So it's

(04:16):
important to ask these questions and then go out and
take measurements and demand that the universe give us answers well.

Speaker 2 (04:22):
And so often when someone sends us a question, it's
a question that a lot of other people haven't thought
about either. And so we wanted to know has our
audience thought about rogue planets and rogue suns? So we
asked them, We asked the extraordinaries, are there rogue planets
and rogue suns?

Speaker 4 (04:40):
I would say pretty common.

Speaker 3 (04:42):
Space is just so big and vast that I just
don't think it's really going to affect us, much like
there's so many rogue planets out there because the initial
conditions of solar systems are super chaotic.

Speaker 2 (04:53):
I think rogue planets and rogue stars are more common
than we may think.

Speaker 1 (04:56):
I don't think there's a discovery yet, as these would
be so dim, so often one of them is flung
out with quite a large velocity. I think we've seen
quite a few of those are observed, at least a
handful of them.

Speaker 3 (05:09):
There are probably a lot of rogue planets and stars
out there.

Speaker 1 (05:13):
Even just one instance of a galaxy collision would disrupt
a significant number of solar systems, so I would venture
to guess there are hundreds of millions, if not billions.
I don't think they are common at all, otherwise we
will be hearing about them all the time.

Speaker 5 (05:27):
I suspect they are quite uncommon from what I've read
and what I've heard from credible podcasts. Not aislot is
that rogue plants are quite common. However, I've heard nothing
about rogue stars. So the only rogue star I could
think of is p Diddy, because girl he went rogue.

Speaker 1 (05:47):
I'd guess there's probably a lot of them, maybe even
more than the well behaved kind.

Speaker 4 (05:51):
Yeah, for once, physics went with an awesome name. Rogue
planets is just such a cool thing to call them.
I think I heard that one three exoplanets are rogue planets,
so they must be incredibly colon And I also think
I had that there are quite a lot of rogue
stars as well, So I think there are loads of

(06:12):
rogue planets, quite a lot of rogue stars.

Speaker 3 (06:15):
I know Kelly doesn't like the names of many of
the concepts in physics, but rogue star and rogue planets
are great titles.

Speaker 2 (06:25):
I totally agree. I am so proud of physicists for
coming up with a good name for once rogue planets
and rogues our data was that just a Daniel flourish
Do you all actually refer to them?

Speaker 1 (06:35):
Okay, all right, I can't take credit for that one,
but I agree it's a good name. It's cool, and
it snappily describes what it really is.

Speaker 2 (06:42):
That's right way to go. Physicists. Keep in mind that
this can go well.

Speaker 1 (06:49):
We just do that occasionally to raise your hopes, and
then we disappoint you over and over again.

Speaker 2 (06:53):
Oh my gosh, so much disappointment these days. All right,
let's get started, because I'm kind of dying to know.
I also did not know the answer to this question
before you sent me the outline, and I didn't read
the outline very well, Daniel, So I'm still not sure
I know the answer.

Speaker 1 (07:06):
So for a dramatic effect, I'm unprepared.

Speaker 2 (07:09):
Nice, that's right. So before we talk about rogue planets
and stars, how about we just talk about normal stars
and planets. How are normal stars and planets formed?

Speaker 1 (07:22):
Yeah, it's important to know where stars and planets come from,
so we can figure out whether there are any stars
and planets out there in the black of space on
their own, like could they form out there by themselves,
et cetera. And the understanding of how we get stars
and planets is incredible because it's one of the great
triumphs of our understanding of the universe. We have now
an explanation for how you go from like a hot

(07:43):
dense soup in the early universe with a few over
densities and a few under densities, a few spots with
like more stuff and a few spots with less stuff,
and evolve that forward in time to get the structure
of the universe that we see today. Briefly, the spots
with more stuff have more gravity and track more stuff together,
and then it clumps and that just keeps happening, so

(08:04):
that you go from a spread out soup of stuff
where everything is very close to the same density, to
spots of incredible density like stars and other places with
massive voids in them.

Speaker 2 (08:14):
That sounds pretty intuitive. Are we like super confident that
this is how stars form? Where is this like the
current hypothesis? And we feel pretty good about it.

Speaker 1 (08:23):
We're very confident in this story because there's so many
elements to it that come together. For example, the way
galaxies form is that these massive clouds of gas come together,
become dense, and then form stars. But if you just
run a simulation of the universe starting from those over
densities and letting the clock go fourteen billion years, you
actually don't see galaxy formation because there's not enough gravity

(08:46):
just from gas and dust and all that stuff to
form galaxies. You need help from dark matter. Dark matter
is most of the matter in the universe, so it
provides most of the gravity, and dark matter forms these
wells into which gas flows and forms these halos where
you get star formation, So dark matter shapes the whole
structure of the universe. When you add dark matter into

(09:08):
those simulations, then you do see galaxy formation and structure formation,
and galaxy clusters and all the crazy stuff that we
see out there in the universe. Not our exact galaxies.
Of course, we can't model that because we don't know
the initial conditions. But the typical distributions of galaxies and
clusters and all that kind of stuff all comes out
beautifully in these simulations if you add the mixture of

(09:30):
normal matter and dark matter that we have in our universe.

Speaker 2 (09:33):
All right, two thoughts. First thought, if I had created
that simulation and what popped out was like a really
nice simulation of the universe, Like I can't even imagine
how cool that must have been to see that on
your screen and be like, oh, I did it. I
understand the universe. Like that sounds amazing. But remind me,
dark matter, dark energy one of them, maybe both we

(09:54):
don't understand very well.

Speaker 1 (09:56):
We don't understand either of them very well, but we
understand dark matter a lot better. The dark matter we
know it's some kind of matter that's out there in
the universe. It's invisible, it's intangible as far as we
can tell. But it does provide gravity, and we know
a lot about where it is and how it flows,
and it's temperature, it's quite cold, but we don't know
what it's made out of it a particle level. But

(10:17):
this is just like one independent line of dark matter evidence.
We need it to make the large scale structure of
the universe and also to make galaxy spin. And also
it explained wiggles in their early universe radiation and all
sorts of independent lines of evidence. Dark energy we know
almost nothing about. We know the universe is expanding and
that expansion is accelerating. We don't understand the mechanism we

(10:38):
call that dark energy, but we also need that to
explain the structure of the universe because it helps power
the expansion of the universe. Anyway, back to stars. Dark
matter and these initial over densities give you these clumps
of gas and dust and those cool and then they
form stars. In order to form stars, you need like
some seed, like a gravitational density, but you also need

(11:01):
the gas there to be kind of cold, because if
it's too hot, if they're moving too fast, then gravity
which is pretty weak in the end, can't grab onto
these tiny gas atoms and collapse them together. So once
it cools down to like ten or twenty kelvin, then
it collapses into these stars. These pockets of densities become protostars,
which get heavier and heavier, and eventually they get enough

(11:23):
mass that there's enough pressure at the core to raise
that temperature up to get fusion, and that's how stars form.

Speaker 2 (11:30):
Okay, And I'm finding myself wondering why didn't everything just
get sucked into the Sun because it's massive, And I
guess it's because everything else is moving so fast it's
able to keep orbit instead of getting sucked in. Is
that right?

Speaker 1 (11:40):
Yeah, it's a great question. You might also ask, like,
why don't we just get one mega sun? Yeah, right,
instead of lots and lots of suns. It's because you
have pockets of density. That's why you get lots of
stars instead of individual ones, so each one forms a seed,
and the same thing happens in the Solar system. We'll
dig into this in a minute when we talk about planets.
But some things are going too fast to fall in immediately,

(12:01):
and there are little gravitational over densities on the outer
edge of these gas blobs, which then rush together to
grab some gas before it all gets sucked into the Sun. Okay,
so yeah, absolutely, And so the crucial thing to understand
here is that stars do not form out in the
middle of space. They form in these huge clouds that
eventually leads to galaxies. And one way we know this

(12:22):
is that when we look at stars, we often find
them in binary star systems. Stars, even in galaxies, are
not made on their own. They're typically made with siblings, two, three,
sometimes seven stars all berthed together, and you find them
still near each other out there. So stars are not
made all on their lonesome. They're made in these vast
nurseries where huge clouds of gas are collapsing into stars.

Speaker 2 (12:44):
And it's impossible for that whole cloud to collapse into
one thing, or just like incredibly improbable.

Speaker 1 (12:51):
It's improbable. Though. We think that in the early universe,
in the first round of collapse of stars, some of
those stars were really monsters, like three hundred times the
mass of our sun, because you didn't have any metals yet.
It was all just hydrogen and tiny bits of helium,
so things were sort of smoother later on when you'd
form metals. Those metals were excellent seeds, so you ended
up getting more smaller stars. But in the early universe

(13:13):
we think there were some really huge monster stars that
were formed. But there's also sort of an upper limit
on the size of a star, around three hundred times
the mass of our sun, because bigger than that, the
core gets so hot that fusion rips apart. The star
and the stars are a balance between gravity that's collapsing
it and fusion that's providing pressure to keep it from collapsing.

(13:33):
If fusion gets too hot, and fusion increases very rapidly
with temperature, then it blows the star apart. So that's
why you didn't get super huge galaxies that are just
like one star, which would be kind of awesome, but
it doesn't really work with physics.

Speaker 2 (13:47):
Lonely it would be lonely exactly, all right. So now
we've tackled stars, what about planets? How does a planet form?

Speaker 1 (13:52):
Yeah, so planets are sort of the leftover bits of
that formation. You have this cloud of gas that's collapsing,
but you have other puck it's a density. You have
like a little bit of metal from an earlier star
or a chunk of rock that forms the seed, and
the rest of the cloud is either molecules of hydrogen
or like micron sized dust greens, which can come together
and stick together with like very weak vander Walls forces,

(14:15):
and this just accumulates and you get like another seed.
So if your disk of gas is very, very smooth,
you might not get any planets, but that's very unlikely
because typically there are little clumps of gravitational over density
that will then form the seed of little sort of
mini collapses. For the same reason that you don't get
one megastar from a molecular cloud, you also don't just

(14:35):
have a collapse into one object. Though the star does
gobble most of the mass in the Solar System because
it forms first and it's big and it's massive and
so gobbles like ninety nine percent of the material. But
if you're far away from the star, you also can
take advantage of ice. If you're far enough away that,
like the star's radiation is not instantly vaporizing all ice,

(14:56):
then you have another solid material you can use to
build your planet.

Speaker 2 (15:00):
I mean, it doesn't make me feel great that planets
are like star crumbs, but I'll take it are there
any solar systems we've seen that have only one planet? Like,
what's the average number of planets in a solar system? Daniel,
surely you have that at your fingertips.

Speaker 1 (15:17):
We have seen a lot of planets out there, something
more than like five thousand or so by now. And
in some solar systems we've only seen one planet because
it's like a big one and it's close to the star,
so it's easier to spot because being close to the
star means it's like a bigger eclipse of the star,
so we can use the transit method. Or a massive
planet means it's pulling on the stars, so we can

(15:39):
use the wiggle method. So we don't know necessarily, but
we suspect that most stars have many planets based on
other observations, and then extrapolating and also from models is
very unlikely to get a single individual planet. But there's
still lots of uncertainty.

Speaker 2 (15:53):
Hear.

Speaker 1 (15:54):
The theory I've just described is called the quark accretion
model that you start with like a little clump and
you gather more stuff around it to make a planet.
There are other theories. Is one called like the gravitational
instability theory, that like an entire planet can form from
a gravitation collapse all at once rather than gradually wo
and neither theory perfectly describes everything we see. We can

(16:15):
look out now into space and see planets form, because remember,
looking into space is looking backwards in time. And sometimes
we can spot a star in formation and you can
see that like the protoplanetary ring around it after only
like you know, half a million years or so, and
can help us test our theories of formation. And sometimes
we see like huge planets and multiple planetary rings and

(16:38):
all sorts of crazy stuff that we don't really understand.
It's often like this that we see things happening more
quickly in the universe than we expect, and so it
updates our model. So we definitely don't have a perfect
theory of planet formation yet.

Speaker 2 (16:50):
Okay, so quick summary. The Sun, we feel super confident
in how that is formed. Planet's a little less confident.

Speaker 1 (16:58):
Yeah, that's true. But the bottom line is that in general,
stars and planets are made in big clumps, in huge
clouds of dust and gas. They're not made out on
their own. You don't just get like a planet randomly
forming in the middle of space.

Speaker 2 (17:13):
All right, done. Thanks for the question, and we'll see
you next week. Oh no, wait, there's more, Oh so
much more, so much more. After the break, we'll give
you more, all right. So daniel just finished telling us

(17:46):
how the Sun is formed and how planets are formed,
and it sounds like you shouldn't get rogue stars and planets,
but you know, this is physics, and so nothing is
as it seems. What happens to give us rogue stars
and planets, Danielle, Well, what we.

Speaker 1 (18:01):
Just learned is where stars and planets are made. That
doesn't limit stars and planets to stay there forever. Right,
Lots of people grow up and then move away from home,
and so stars and planets might also be able to
do that. But what this means is that to get
rogue stars and planets you have to somehow form them
in galaxies and then eject them. Right, we need some
method to get them out of the galaxies if they're

(18:24):
going to be out there in the middle of space.
And so let's start with rogue stars. Stars were very
confident begin in galaxies, although I'll add we talked about
the development of stars as if that's where all the
gas in dust is. But there's an enormous amount of
gas between galaxies as well. There are these huge filaments
of gas connecting the individual gravitational wells. Something like half

(18:48):
of all the baryons. The normal matter in the universe
is outside of galaxies. It's just very very dilute and
very very hot. So it's not the place where stars
will form, but it's not like it's really empty space.
Incredible filaments of gas connecting all the galaxies.

Speaker 2 (19:03):
I love that that. You know, you connected these rogue
stars to like humans moving away, and now we've got
this other connection here. You know, the universe is full
of gas and so are humans, and I just I'm
feeling celestial today.

Speaker 1 (19:15):
Yeah, exactly. Well maybe people move out because they were
too full of gas and their families couldn't stand it.

Speaker 2 (19:19):
Oh, be gone.

Speaker 1 (19:23):
So the crucial question to understanding how a star can
leave the galaxy is essentially like escape velocity. How can
it get out of the galaxy? Galaxies exist for a
reason because they have a lot of gravity. They tend
to hang on to their stars that's where they're formed,
and there's so much mass there that like, for example,
our Sun is orbiting the center of the galaxy and
it takes a few hundred million years to go all

(19:44):
the way around, but it's unlikely to just like wander
out of the galaxy. It is bound there, right, And
we think we understand the gravitational dynamics of galaxies. This
is how we first discovered dark matter. We saw that
stars are not being thrown into intergalactic space very often
because they're something in the galaxy providing that gravity to
hold them together. All right, but that doesn't mean that

(20:05):
it's impossible. It just means you need a lot of speed,
sometimes up to thousands or millions of kilometers per hour, wow,
and that can happen. We know also that galaxies form
in the method we just describe, but then they also combine. Right,
the method we talked about makes essentially a bunch of
little baby galaxies. But if we look at galaxies today,
they're big, they're huge, and they show evidence of collisions

(20:29):
of mergers. So the Milky Way, for example, is a
combination of a bunch of little galaxies which came together.
And when galaxies come together, it's sometimes peaceful, but often
it's chaotic, and what happens is some stars get tossed
into space.

Speaker 2 (20:45):
I have to admit I'm a little biased towards a
particular listener question, and that was my daughter's listener question,
because I think she asked you if our Sun was
thrown out of another galaxy and ended up where it
is today, and I think you said no, Is that right?

Speaker 1 (21:00):
Yeah, I don't remember any detail because we answer so
many questions and we're trying to be democratic about the
manacho any favoritism. Oh, but I'm glad that you remember.
So in that sense, it's true that our star has
always been a member of the Milky Way. But it's
also possible that it was a member of another galaxy
which informed and became the Milky Way, like joined with

(21:22):
the Milky Way. Though our star is fairly young for
the Milky Way, like the Milky Way is almost as
old as the universe, and our Star is only a
few billion years old, So it's also possible that are
formed in the Milky Way.

Speaker 2 (21:34):
Wow, Okay, cool. So sometimes galaxies combine, and how exactly
does that result in something getting kicked out so that
it's no longer part of the club.

Speaker 1 (21:43):
Yeah. So you have these two galaxies, each of which
is already spinning, right, and now they come in and
they combine, they form a new center of mass. And
some things naturally have the right velocity in the right
distance and the right direction in order to be orbiting
the new center of mass. But sometimes they don't, and
the new center of mass has like a gravity to
tug on that star and just eject it. And so

(22:05):
it's not guaranteed that everything in the old galaxies finds
a new stable orbit in the new galaxies.

Speaker 2 (22:11):
It's a real drag when things change.

Speaker 1 (22:13):
It can exactly. And remember that at the hearts of
these galaxies are super massive black holes, these enormously massive,
very dense, compact objects we don't understand very well that
can provide a huge gravitational boost. And so if the
new stars coming in get close to the supermassive black
hole of the other galaxy Boom, they can very easily
get ejected wow or even without a merger. If a

(22:35):
star wanders too close to the super massive black hole
in our galaxy, for example, then it can get a
big kick and become what they call a hypervelocity star.

Speaker 2 (22:43):
WHOA How do we detect and measure this stuff?

Speaker 1 (22:46):
So, of course space telescopes when if humanity's greatest invention
give more money. We can look at these stars and
we can measure their velocity by looking at the red shift.
We know how a star should admit light at what
frequencies because we know what they're made out of, and
we can look at the spectrum and say, oh, look,
there's hydrogenous helium, there's other stuff in the atmosphere of
this star. But if we see those things shifted from

(23:07):
the fingerprints where we expect to see them, then we
know that the star has a velocity. Because a velocity
from the star will give a Doppler shift, will change
the light. It will red shift all the light from
that star. So a star moving away from us will
be redder and a star moving towards us will be bluer.
So by looking at the spectrum of the star, you
can measure the velocity of the star. This is how

(23:29):
we see that most of the universe is moving away
from us by looking at the red shift of stars
in other galaxies. We can also do that for individual
stars within our galaxy. And we've been doing that for
like twenty or thirty years now.

Speaker 2 (23:41):
WHOA so how often have we seen something being ejected?

Speaker 1 (23:45):
So we've seen a bunch of stars inside our galaxy
that have crazy high velocities like this one called S
five hbs one moving almost two thousand kilometers per second
relative to the center of the galaxy, and if you
look at its trajectory, it looks like it visited the
galactic center, got boosted by something in there, and is
now headed straight out of the galaxy.

Speaker 2 (24:06):
Is it going to stop.

Speaker 1 (24:07):
Unless it gets deflected by something else along the way?
It's moving out and we just hope that it writes
this letters and updates us on its life.

Speaker 2 (24:13):
But it's just going to keep going and going and going.
And oh man, sorry, yeah, because the galaxy is pretty sparse,
especially once you leave the center, and so it's not
easy to like hit another star.

Speaker 1 (24:24):
I mean, there's going to be gravitational deflections, but this
thing is moving super fast.

Speaker 2 (24:28):
Wow.

Speaker 1 (24:28):
Another way you can get a hypervelocity star is being
kicked by a supernova. So, for example, if you have
a binary star system, two stars formed together burning near
each other, if one of them becomes a supernova, which
happens sometimes if it's like not enough mass to become
a supernova and it becomes a white dwarf and then
later it gathers a little bit of extra mass, sometimes

(24:49):
from its partner. Then it can suddenly go supernova. That's
the type one A supernova, and that boost can kick
the other star out of the galaxy. And we've seen
one of these things. It's called U seven oh eight,
a helium rich subdwarf star moving super fast more than
a thousand kilometers per second, probably ejected by type one
A supernova. It's essentially it's partner. So that's like a

(25:11):
star divorce.

Speaker 2 (25:12):
Oh ooh, And divorces are rarely clean and nice things,
but sometimes they are. But so it was super and ova.
That's just like a giant explosion, right, So the explosion
scent it flying, Yeah.

Speaker 1 (25:23):
Exactly, it's a huge explosion. Really, this is an enormous
amount of energy. These stars are briefly brighter than the
rest of the galaxy combined. Wow, it's really a mind
boggling amount of energy, and all that radiation pressure can
push the other star and send it out of the
community to its lonely divorced data apartment. It's not me,
it's you, exactly. So the Doppler technique is the way

(25:49):
we measure these things, and so you can look around
and try to measure the speeds. But sometimes we can't
even measure these speeds very well. We can only sort
of find a minimum.

Speaker 2 (25:59):
Why why is it so hard to measure the speed
is because they're so far away and moving so fast.
I mean, it's amazing we can measure any of this
stuff at all, to be.

Speaker 1 (26:05):
Fair, Yeah, well, we can essentially only measure the speed
away from us, right, And so a star is moving
at an angle, then it has an additional velocity that
we're not capturing. OK, so this is sort of a
minimum speed.

Speaker 2 (26:17):
Cool.

Speaker 1 (26:18):
We have theories for how this might happen. Et. People
have been looking for these stars, and some astronomers from
Vanderbilt identified more than six hundred and seventy stars at
the edge of the Milky Way, sort of between us
and Andromeda. And these are stars that have already been ejected.
They're like living out there in the middle of space.
These are not stars that we're projecting are going to

(26:38):
leave the galaxy. They're just like out there floating in
the middle between us and the next galaxy.

Speaker 2 (26:43):
Wow, and they must all be incredibly far away.

Speaker 1 (26:46):
Yeah, exactly. These are far away stars. They're hard to see,
but the light that comes from them also tells us
about their origin. These stars are red giant stars. They
have a lot of metal in them, and it's hard
to find metals in between. Galaxiest tend to be at
the core, where there's a lot of gravity. There's more
metals at the center of the gravity than there are
in our neighborhood of the galaxy, and there's even less

(27:08):
in the outskirts of the galaxy. So the fact that
these stars have a lot of metal in them tells
us that they're probably formed close to the center of
a galaxy. These are definitely not formed out there in space.
So this is like direct confirmation of this whole idea
that stars are formed in galaxies and then sometimes ejected,
especially from the core, out into space.

Speaker 2 (27:27):
Man, it's got to be hard to go from the
center of the universe to us to getting thrown out
on your own.

Speaker 1 (27:34):
Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 2 (27:35):
So I was really having fun when we were talking
about explosions. Are there any more explosion based ways that
stars can go rogue?

Speaker 1 (27:43):
Sometimes stars go rogue and then they explode. This is
super awesome. It's an intergalactic supernova. So imagine the scenario
we had before. We have like a white dwarf and
a partner star, And earlier we talked about that white
dwarf exploding and kicking its partner out of the galaxy,
which seems unfair, but hey, it happens. It's a cold
universe out there. But sometimes those two stars get kicked

(28:05):
out together by something else. Maybe they together visited the
core of the galaxy and get ejected. Now they're out
there in the middle space between galaxies, and they're still
doing their thing, and then one of them can go
supernova by grabbing some of the material from the other one,
and so they can create an explosion out there in
the middle of space.

Speaker 2 (28:26):
And that blows both of them, like out farther or
just one of them.

Speaker 1 (28:32):
So then the other one, if it survives. They don't
always survive, but if it does, it'll get ejected in
some new direction. Right, So it's already got thrown out
by the galaxy, and now it's partners rejecting it and
it's getting shot out in some new direction. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (28:44):
How could you possibly know that things had taken such
a complicated path without observing that directly. That's amazing.

Speaker 1 (28:51):
It's hard to explain how you might get a supernova
otherwise in between galaxies, whether it just isn't the material
to form these stars.

Speaker 2 (28:58):
Wow, So how many of these are there? Do we think?

Speaker 1 (29:02):
So it's a great question. We've seen a lot of them,
like hundreds thousands by now of these intergalactic stars, these
rogue stars floating out there, and we're confident that they
come from galaxies. And then we take this step that
astronomers often do, which is try to estimate how many
of them are there, Like we're seeing a small number
of them, but we can also estimate our ability to

(29:22):
see them, Like if we think we're seeing only one
percent of the stuff that's out there because it's blocked
by something or because of our detection capabilities, that we
can count the number we see and extrapolate to the
total population. That's always a bit of a dangerous extrapolation
because you never really know what fraction of stuff are
you seeing because you don't see the whole denominator. But
you can use models and theories, et cetera. So this

(29:45):
is very speculative and there's lots of different estimates. Some
early estimates suggested that ten to twenty percent of all
stars in galactic clusters are not in a galaxy. That
they're between galaxies. Yeah, like one in five.

Speaker 2 (29:59):
That's way higher than and I would have guessed. I
don't know why that seemed like a rare thing.

Speaker 1 (30:03):
It seems like it should be a rare thing. On
the other hand, I think we're biased because of our experience.
We tend to think of our star and our planets
and our galaxy is the typical thing. But we've learned
over and over in physics that our experience is not typical.
Our kind of matter isn't typical, our star isn't typical,
and so this is just another example. And then I
read a more recent study that suggested maybe up to

(30:26):
fifty percent of all stars are not in galaxies. This
is much more speculative, and it came from understanding the
extra galactic background light, which is just like an overall
general glow of light that comes from outside the galaxy
that we don't fully understand and could be coming from
tons and tons of these hypervelocity rogue stars. But it's

(30:47):
very indirect and speculative. So the bottom line is it's
a big number rogue stars are out there. They're not rare.
We don't know what fraction of stars in the universe
are rogue. It might be ten percent, might be twenty percent,
might be fifty percent. It's some huge fraction of the
stuff that's out there in the universe. It's not unusual.

Speaker 2 (31:05):
So from a sci fi perspective, whenever I hear about
dice and spheres, I think, what right do you have
to take all of the light from the Sun and
deprive all the planets that rely on that light? You know,
of the Sun's light. But if fifty percent of the
suns out there, yeah, don't have any planets around them.
We could just go and capture that energy. And what
does that harm?

Speaker 1 (31:26):
Well, that's a great question. Actually, if a star is
ejected from the galaxy, does it keep its planets or not? Right,
because I think you're assuming that a star that undergoes
that kind of gravitational perturbation is going to lose its planets,
And I think that's probably true, but not necessarily right.
If you think about the whole Solar System as an object,
it basically gets the same gravity, and so like the

(31:48):
forces on the star are the same as the forces
on the planets. Depends in detail and how close it
comes to that super massive black hole, does it feel
tidal forces is that black hole pulling the whole Solar
system apart or pushing on the entire thing together? Does
the star have enough gravity to hang on to its planets?

Speaker 2 (32:05):
Okay, so you're saying that, like some of the things
that we've just talked about, when the Sun gets ejected,
it brings its planets with it, and it forms a
solar system in a new place.

Speaker 1 (32:15):
I think that's possible. I think it's more likely that
they lose it because of the crazy physics involved, but
it's not guaranteed. So some of those rogue stars probably
do have planets, So hold off on stealing all of
their energy, please, Kelly.

Speaker 2 (32:27):
Well, you know that I'm a skeptic in all things,
so I don't suspect this will come up soon, but
you know I would caution people to see if there
are planets before you steal a sun's energy.

Speaker 1 (32:39):
Like a good policy. All Right, So let's take a
break and we come back. We'll talk about rogue planets
out there without a galaxy or even without a star.

Speaker 2 (33:07):
All Right, we're back and we're talking about rogue planets.
And so, just to clarify, you were telling us a
moment ago that suns can get ejected, and sometimes they
take their planets with them.

Speaker 1 (33:16):
We've never seen that because it's hard to see exoplanets,
especially for really distant stars and the higher velocity stars
we've seen. We've never identified an exoplanet on a hypervelocity star,
but it is possible.

Speaker 2 (33:28):
Okay, But when we were talking about rogue planets, now
we're not talking about planets that got pulled with their star.
We're talking about planets that got pushed away from their
star and now they're all out on their own. Is
that right?

Speaker 1 (33:39):
Yeah, exactly, So a rogue planet would be a planet
inside the galaxy still, oh, but without a star to
call home, right, because the galaxy is mostly empty. I me,
it looks pretty bright when you look up at the
stars at night and you can see the Milky Way,
and there are lots and lots of stars out there,
but most places in the galaxy are pretty far from
any star. If you get like randomly dropped into a

(34:01):
spot in the galaxy, the odds are you're not close
to any star. That mostly you just see like distant
stars around you. But you wouldn't consider yourself gravitationally bound
or held by any star.

Speaker 2 (34:12):
But there'd probably be gas.

Speaker 1 (34:14):
The gas is always gas.

Speaker 2 (34:16):
There's always gas. The one constant in life is gas
and radiation.

Speaker 1 (34:20):
And so think of these planets as like having the
same relationship with the galaxy as our sun does. Right
the Sun orbits the center of the galaxy, you could
also have a planet out there orbiting the center of
the galaxy, not necessarily orbiting a star directly. So that's
what we would call a rogue planet.

Speaker 2 (34:36):
So how do you get rogue planets?

Speaker 4 (34:37):
Then?

Speaker 1 (34:38):
So it's sort of the same process we talked about
for stars, but in miniature, like if two solar systems
come near each other, then the stars can tug on
each other's planets and cause gravitational instability. Our orbit around
the star is pretty stable. Like a little perturbation, we'll
go back to our orbit, but it's not that stable.
You give it a big enough push, we get the
wrong direction. We are flying out of this solar system,

(35:01):
and so it's certainly possible that a visitor can come
and perturb our solar system and we could end up
losing a planet.

Speaker 2 (35:07):
There's the existential dreadf come to expect from a white
Sun episode. Glad we got.

Speaker 1 (35:12):
There, And also sometimes the planets form, and it's pretty chaotic.
Like we think of the Solar system as very stable
and chill. Everybody's driving around the star is staying in
their lane. But you know, this is billions of years
along and earlier on there was a lot of chaos.
As the planets formed. They gravitationally interact with each other,
and any system that has more than two objects in

(35:33):
it is chaotic and hard to predict. We had like
Saturn and Jupiter and we think another major gas giant
in our Solar system. And then Jupiter and Saturn moved
in towards the center of the Solar system and then
they got tugged by the other planet and Jupiter and
Saturn came back out, so they didn't like fall into
the Sun, but the other planet got ejected. And so

(35:57):
this can happen that you have this complicated interaction between
the planets, or sometimes a neighboring star can perturb things
and you get a lot of planets actually thrown out
of solar systems.

Speaker 2 (36:08):
So this isn't just when solar systems are initially forming.
This could this could happen now.

Speaker 1 (36:13):
You should be worrying about it right now, Kelly. In fact,
if you don't worry about it. It's more likely to happen.

Speaker 2 (36:17):
Oh my gosh, kissing bugs. Planets getting ejected. It's a
scary world.

Speaker 1 (36:22):
It mostly happens in the early days of a solar system,
but it could happen. Yeah, if we have another star
come and visit us really close, then absolutely you could
scramble our solar system. And we've done a bunch of
calculations and they suggest that like maybe twenty five to
fifty percent of planets that get formed get ejected from
stars what now exactly, which kind of makes sense because

(36:45):
it's not that easy to get everything arranged in the
right angles and velocities and distances to stay in a
stable orbit, especially when you've got other planets tugging on you.

Speaker 2 (36:53):
And so do these planets tend to like get sucked
into other solar systems eventually or they're just off completely themselves.

Speaker 1 (37:01):
They can be sucked into other solar systems, but a
lot of them are just off by themselves because the
galaxy is mostly empty. But yeah, you could end up
being captured by another solar system, or if you're a
tiny planet, you can join the like huge crowd of
frozen stuff. The outskirts of solar systems, right, So absolutely
this gonna happen. And for example, like those interstellar visitors

(37:21):
like Atlas and know Mua mua, I love the.

Speaker 2 (37:23):
Way you always say that right the first time, which
is totally different than how I say it.

Speaker 1 (37:28):
These things are demonstrations of how that works. Right. These
things were formed around another star and then gravitationally somehow
detached from that star, sent through space and now hitting
our Solar system. And it's unlikely that they're going to
get captured in our solar system and like join our neighborhood.
They're going to fly through and get sling shotted out
in some other direction. But there's stuff out there that's
formed by one solar system, ejected and now flying through space,

(37:52):
maybe interacting with other stars. And we think that there
are a lot of planets that are like this.

Speaker 2 (37:57):
Is there any evidence that any of the planets in
our solar system we're thrown out of another one and
ended up in ours.

Speaker 1 (38:03):
You're wondering if any planets are adopted.

Speaker 2 (38:06):
That's right, we love adoption.

Speaker 1 (38:08):
No, there's no evidence for that, and all the models
suggest that the planets we have were formed here, but
that there were some planets formed here that we've lost.

Speaker 2 (38:15):
Okay, are there any other ways?

Speaker 1 (38:17):
There are some other ways you might get a rogue planet.
For example, if you have a star that's forming, but
it's not enough mass to really have fusion, so it
becomes like a sub brown dwarf star. That's a star
that isn't hot enough at its core to ignite real fusion.
Sometimes you can get like a weaker version of fusion going.
But sometimes they're in the middle. There's sort of like

(38:38):
a super Jupiter, like a version of Jupiter that's really big,
bigger than Jupiter, smaller than what you need to get
fusion going. A lot to argument about whether this should
be called a rogue planet because it's not really like
a planet formed around a star and then ejected, or
like a failed star. So you know, astronomers argue about names.

Speaker 2 (38:56):
Yeah, and those names carry baggage star.

Speaker 1 (39:01):
Would you rather be a rogue or a failure?

Speaker 2 (39:03):
Yeah, I'd rather be a rugue rogue obviously, Yeah, that's
way cooler. Rogue implies you chose this path, right exactly.

Speaker 1 (39:11):
I was never trying to be a star anyway. Okay,
that's right, And these are things that we can see
out there in the galaxy. They're not nearly as far
away as the hypervelocity intergalactic stars that we talked about,
but they're harder to see because they're not bright. Right.
Stars emit light, so you can see distant stars pretty easily.

(39:31):
Planets don't emit visible light, but they do emit in
the infrared. Remember that everything that's out there in the
universe that has a temperature, which is everything except for
dark matter, glows at some frequency, and that frequency depends
on the temperature. So the hotter you are, the higher
the frequency. The colder you are, the lower the frequency.
So Earth glows, for example, in the infrared. If you
take night vision goggles, you can look down to the ground.

(39:53):
You can see light being emitted from the surface, just
the way you can see light emitted from another person,
and it's a different temperature, and that's how you can
see like people at night. Or that's how those thermometers
work that look at your forehead in deduce your temperature
without touching you. They're measuring the frequency of infrared light
and inverting that process to deduce what your temperature must be.

(40:14):
So we can directly see planets using infrared telescopes because
they glow in that particular wavelength. We can't use this
technique to see exoplanets because they're usually like drowned out
by their star. There is possible, but you can directly
image rogue planets using like the Wise infrared telescope to
see them in the IR, which is super cool.

Speaker 2 (40:34):
That is super cool. Is that the only way we
see them.

Speaker 1 (40:36):
No, the most more common way is to see micro lensing.
Like you're looking at a star out in space, and
they shouldn't twinkle right out in space, stars don't twinkle.
That's an atmospheric effect we have on the ground in
out in space, they shouldn't twinkle. But if something passes
between you and the star, like a little mini eclipse.
They call this micro lensing, then you can deduce if
there was something there, and so you can look out

(40:58):
into space and count how often like stars twinkle essentially,
and there's a project here called OGLE Optical Gravitational Lensing
Experiment awesome acronym GUYS, and another one MOA micro Lensing
Observations in astrophysics, and these things measure how often this happens,
and then they do that same inversion step. They're like well,
we see seventy four of these, how likely are we

(41:19):
to see one if it's out there? You know, what
are the chances that the star and the planet arrange
themselves in exactly the right way? And then they estimate
how many there are out there in the universe.

Speaker 2 (41:29):
So, if you detect micro lensing, something has gotten the
way of your image, you've got a little eclipse going on.
How do you know that that's an exoplanet and not
like a big comet or something.

Speaker 1 (41:41):
Yeah, it's a great question. Essentially, we could only see
this for bigger stuff. So like, what's the difference between
a big comet and a planet? Basically just the size, right.
A comet is just a chunk of rock and ice
anyway that's been ejected from a solar system. Like would
you call Omuamua or Atlas a comet or a planet?
We just call them a comet because they're not as
big as a planet. But we can only really see

(42:02):
stuff that's like Jupiter sized or a little bit smaller,
because otherwise it's too small to really eclipse the star.
This is really cool, but one time they saw a
Jupiter sized free floating planet and they think they saw
a moon around that planet. So this is like an
exo moon around a rogue planet.

Speaker 2 (42:22):
Oh that's really cool. Yeah, I want of is it?

Speaker 1 (42:26):
And this is due to like the pattern of the
eclipse as the lensing event happens. Right, it doesn't look
like just a sphere. It looks like a sphere plus
another sphere in order to model the pattern of the light.
Super cool, and we should see lots more of these.
The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will measure the deflection
of background star's position to determine rogue planet masses. So

(42:47):
we have like a lot of observations of rogue planets
coming up in the future. But again, we think that
rogue planets are not rare. We think that probably the
Milky Way has billions of row planets, not like seven,
like forty two and not sixty five thousand, but billions
of rogue planets.

Speaker 2 (43:07):
Wow, okay, and so all right, So now we've got
billions of data points as I imagine them out in space.
Are they easier to study or harder to study than
planets that are part of a solar system because I
imagine they're not being like drowned out by their sun
on the other hand, maybe some light from the sun
is helpful to view them. Like, how, yeah, tell me

(43:27):
about studying these guys.

Speaker 1 (43:28):
Yeah, you basically nailed that. It's easier and harder. So
it's easier in some ways because they're not drowned out
by their star, but it's harder because that star can
illuminate them. Like some studies we do in exoplanets require
the light from that star. We can, for example, measure
that light going through that planet's atmosphere and then use
that to detect what's in the atmosphere that star by
which light's been absorbed and which light has not been absorbed.

(43:50):
So that's a cool study you can do on an
exoplanet around another star that you couldn't do on an
exo rogue planet. But exoogue planets you can see there
infrared light directly, which means you can do things like
measure the surface temperature of that planet, you know, and
understand what light it's emitting and all sorts of cool stuff.
So yeah, you can do different kinds of science.

Speaker 2 (44:10):
Amazing. So what other kinds of science can we do
now that we figured out that there are rogue planets
and rogue stars.

Speaker 1 (44:16):
Well, it really helps inform our model of solar system
formation and galactic formation right to understand how this happens.
Because our models should predict this, then we should go
out and check it and see that we see the
number of planets and stars that we are expecting. I remember,
there's still a lot of uncertainty because a lot of
the steps here do have direct observation to support them,
but some of them have some extrapolation that relies on models, right,

(44:39):
like what fraction of these things should we see? And
so you know, over the next few years we'll get
better and better and these estimates will are firmer and firmer.
But I think we can be confident in the bottom
line that there are a lot of them.

Speaker 2 (44:50):
By the time this episode comes out, everybody should have
their physical copy of Do Aliens Speak Physics in their hands,
and they would have had at least a month to
And so I'm sure that you are all dreaming about
aliens as much as I have been since reading the book,
and so you're probably wondering could life evolve on roadue
planets and what would it be like? And could they

(45:11):
communicate with us? So, Daniel, is their life on road planets?

Speaker 1 (45:15):
I certainly hope so, because it would provide the kind
of alternative aliens that I like thinking about in that book.
You know, ways that aliens might have evolved that are
very different from ours, that would lead them to explore
and understand the universe very differently. Like imagine evolving on
a planet like that. You have no seasons, you have
no days, right, because all these things require a star.

(45:36):
The surface is going to be extraordinarily cold. The atmosphere
might be snow. It just might freeze and fall to
the surface. The whole top mile of an ocean could
be frozen. So you're more likely to evolve, you know,
underneath a very frozen ocean, if you're kept warm by
like the internal geothermal of that planet. You know, on Earth,

(45:57):
something like ninety nine point seven percent of our energy
comes from the Sun, and so it'd be very difficult
to evolve in that scenario. But if you do, you'd
have a unique perspective on the universe. For sure.

Speaker 2 (46:09):
It is really good to live on Earth, which I
think is the message that we come to at the
end of almost every episode where we talk about space.
It is pretty solid to be right here.

Speaker 1 (46:19):
It is. I love that we get to live on Earth.
It's a pretty cushy place to evolve. But I hope
the aliens are out there and they had a very
weird experience, because talking to scientists from that planet could
give us a very different view on how the universe works.
You know, if you evolve on a rogue planet, maybe
you're not interested in stars and you haven't focused on
solar systems, and you have a very different way of
seeing the universe and the galaxy. Maybe you don't break

(46:42):
it up into the same units we do, and so
you've come up with alternative explanations or gone down different paths,
which of course could just inform our joint understanding of
the universe.

Speaker 2 (46:52):
Well, I hope that one day we meet aliens from
a rogue planet.

Speaker 1 (46:57):
And that they're not rogues.

Speaker 2 (46:58):
They're very friendly, that's right, that's right. But Daniel will
meet them anyway, even if they're going to eat him,
as long as he gets to ask them about physics verse.

Speaker 1 (47:06):
That's right. Maybe they'll be part of the extraordinaries.

Speaker 2 (47:08):
I hope. So how could they not be?

Speaker 1 (47:12):
All right? So thank you very much for going on
this trip with us out into intergalactic space and into
interstellar space to imagine where stars and planets could form.
If you have questions about the universe, please don't be
shy right to us. We love tackling your questions on
the pod.

Speaker 2 (47:26):
And thanks to Steve for his question. Let's go to
Steve and see what he thought of the episode.

Speaker 3 (47:31):
Yikes, one in five planets are stars are rogue? That
is way higher odds than I would have given them.
What I thought was a random idea is estimated to
be quite common. Who would have thunk it? As you
have pointed out, this is yet another example of our
human bias when thinking about the universe. Thank you for
the answer to my question. Now, with this new knowledge,

(47:54):
I'm hoping to see a hypervelocity star whiz by Earth
sometime sooner.

Speaker 2 (48:07):
Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe is produced by iHeartRadio. We
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Speaker 1 (48:12):
We really would. We want to know what questions you
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Speaker 2 (48:18):
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