[ExI] RES: Planets galore!

Henrique Moraes Machado cetico.iconoclasta at gmail.com
Wed Feb 8 19:11:03 UTC 2012


<BillK> We estimate that there may be up to ~10^5 compact objects in the
mass
 range 10^{-8} -10^{-2} solar mass per main sequence star that are unbound
 to a host star in the Galaxy. We refer to these objects as nomads; in the
 literature a subset of these are sometimes called free-floating or rogue
 planets. Our estimate for the number of Galactic nomads is consistent with
a
 smooth extrapolation of the mass function of unbound objects above the
 Jupiter-mass scale, the stellar mass density limit, and the metallicity of
the
 interstellar medium.
</BillK>

This makes perfect sense to me. Considering that a star happens when enough
gas is gathered in a sphere to ignite nuclear fusion, it makes sense that
the amount of failed stars must be bigger than the amount of successful
ones. They just couldn't gather enough gas.




More information about the extropy-chat mailing list