[ExI] Planets galore!

[Samantha Atkins]

Yummy!  The answer to whether to stay where the information flow is 
hyper fast and rich or go off exploring?  Take your entire planet with 
you.  I saw a paper by some mad scientist that I don't have immediately 
at hand.  Its premise was that it might be possible to introduce just 
the right size black hole into a planet in a way where the energy 
released by infalling matter just balanced the gravitational force of 
the hole with enough internal heat generated to keep the planet 
reasonably warm at the surface without a nearby star.    Of course if 
you have enough uber-energy of any kind you should be able to keep many 
parts of the surface or interior comfortable enough for life.  Of course 
if your civilization has gone post-biological this may not be as much of 
an issue.

- samantha



On 02/08/2012 08:32 AM, BillK wrote:
> Nomadic Planets May Swarm the Galaxy
> <http://arxiv.org/abs/1201.2687>
> <http://kipac.stanford.edu/collab/research/highlights/tidbits2012/nomads>
>
> 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.
>
> Complete pdf file
> <http://arxiv.org/pdf/1201.2687>
>
> ===============
>
>
> Can there really be up to 100,000 wandering planets for *every* star?
> That's a mind-boggling big number of planets.
>
>
> BillK
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