FEATURE | ROGUE PLANETS
Imagine a world where the sun never rises. A planet that doesn't even have a sun. A place with no pastel-painting-sunsets and no dawn choruses, just a constant veil of faint stars twinkling in a perpetual, indelible inky night.
This unfamiliar scenario would be the reality for any life calling a starless planet home, such as one that's somehow become untethered from its star, rendering it free to wander through the Universe.
When we think about planets, we usually picture the eight worlds of our Solar System silently orbiting the central star that's pulling on invisible gravitational strings to keep them close. Yet in recent years astronomers have uncovered an increasingly large population of a very different kind of planet. Worlds that no longer orbit a star at all, worlds that wander the void between stars. Free-floating, rogue planets.
“They are planets that originally orbited a star, but then something happened and they were kicked out,” says Dr Alexander Scholz, an astronomer from the University of St Andrews, who studies these strange, orphaned worlds.
Early in their lives, solar systems are particularly chaotic places. Two sibling planets could
