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Roaming planets … again

10 August 2011
Astronomy

At a variety of blogs, for example at www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2023778/Planets-survive-stars-su… , we have this story that is basically a paper that purports to explain the discovery of planets unattached to star systems, lots of them. A new theory has inevitably been devised by (experts, according to the Daily Mail reporter). They suggest such planets may have been ejected from solar systems by supernova events (the explosion of stars). Supernovae are what is thought to happen when a star is said to die, seen as a dramatic increase in luminosity (but relatively short lived). The mass of the star is thought to be blown away during a supernova event, and the planets in orbit around it disintegrate. It is now proposed that planets in far orbits may actually get blown away by the explosion – into deep space, thereafter destined to roam unattended and alone (unless captured by another star system). Observations now seem to indicate there might be more planets roaming loose and free than there are attached to the solar systems of stars – and not all stars may have planets in any case. We might ask ourselves, is there some kind of fundamental flaw in the consensus on the origin of the universe, our galaxy, and our solar system? This is where the Electric Universe model should gain some traction but is there also a fundamental reason that inhibits such momentum? 

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