A Universe with Billions of Binary Planets?

 

           



The discovery that there are perhaps billions of solo rogue planets and binary planet systems in the Milky Way alone has led to a new theoretical study by astronomer Hagai Perets and his colleague at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics that proposes a possible answer: the distant planets are not part of the original stellar system - they were captured by the star. 

Astronomers know that there are many so-called "free floating planets" in space - planets that have been tossed out of their original solar system by a random gravitational encounter with another planet. Some of these orphan planets have recently been detected.

The CfA team calculated that it would be possible for a star to capture one of these orphans if the conditions were right; namely, if the star and planet happen to pass close to each other with only a small velocity difference, and if there are no other massive bodies nearby to interfere with the "adoption." They ran a series of computer simulations to test all these and other possibilities, and they found not only that such a capture was possible, but that a star could even capture several orphan planets.

In fact, they found that sometimes two free floating planets could capture one another and form a binary planet. None of these binaries has yet been seen, although some astronomers think that since Pluto and its moon Charon have such similar masses they are a binary system, although not necessarily one that was captured.

The new results seem to offer a reasonable, if exotic, explanation for some of the complex planetary configurations that have been discovered, and they remind us that nature is full of surprises.

The Daily Galaxy via Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics

Image credit: With thanks to maelstrom/images/binary-planet

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[dr burke]

And all we have to do is coach them into earth orbit, unfreeze and wait for them
to thaw out.

[Allan W Janssen]

I saw that in an episode of Star Trek!

[Tosca Zraikat]

That's the most certain statement that anyone has yet made on this site: that nature is full of surprises. And I love reading about every one of them. If scientists (in all fields) would remember that nature will always surprise and astonish with the unexpected, science could really become the truly creative, open-minded, mind-expanding, wise endeavour that it aspires to be. Surprise is good!!

[Simon]

I've asked this before and got short shrift from others on this site but is everyone sure that all these planets (billions in the Milky Way alone!)don't make up a great deal of the so called missing matter that physicists and astronomers are always banging on about?

[Billyboyles]

Are not the Earth and Moon a binary planet system?

[Sample Papers]

What is the exact meaning of binary planet?? Can anyone explain??

[Mark D]

Interesting remark by billyboyles... yeah, I think that could be argued. It might also be argued that the earth and moon [which is moving away from the earth, on average, some millimeters each year] were created in their present form from a collision. Perhaps these were a binary system that became destabilized.