Well, they had to put the planet factory somewhere, and The Oort Cloud is a goldmine of 'matter'.
Posted on 05/10/2012 10:10:10 AM PDT by LibWhacker
Researchers say life-bearing planets may exist in vast numbers in the space between stars in the Milky Way
A few hundred thousand billion free-floating life-bearing Earth-sized planets may exist in the space between stars in the Milky Way. So argues an international team of scientists led by Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe, Director of the Buckingham Centre for Astrobiology at the University of Buckingham, UK. Their findings are published online in the Springer journal Astrophysics and Space Science.
The scientists have proposed that these life-bearing planets originated in the early Universe within a few million years of the Big Bang, and that they make up most of the so-called “missing mass” of galaxies. The scientists calculate that such a planetary body would cross the inner solar system every 25 million years on the average and during each transit, zodiacal dust, including a component of the solar system’s living cells, becomes implanted at its surface. The free-floating planets would then have the added property of mixing the products of local biological evolution on a galaxy-wide scale.
Since 1995, when the first extrasolar planet was reported, interest in searching for planets has reached a feverish pitch. The 750 or so detections of exoplanets are all of planets orbiting stars, and very few, if any, have been deemed potential candidates for life. The possibility of a much larger number of planets was first suggested in earlier studies where the effects of gravitational lensing of distant quasars by intervening planet-sized bodies were measured. Recently several groups of investigators have suggested that a few billion such objects could exist in the galaxy. Wickramasinghe and team have increased this grand total of planets to a few hundred thousand billion (a few thousand for every Milky Way star) - each one harbouring the legacy of cosmic primordial life.
Yikes! That's almost 200 rogue, planet-sized, planet killers have zipped past us in the last 4.5 billion years.
Speaking of nomads.
A free-floating planet far from a star would have a temperature of 25K, if that. The blackbody temperature would be lower, I’m assuming some warmth from radioactive dacay, assuming the same amount of U and K as here.
I read a paper that discussed tracking long-period or one-time comets back to their origins, and they postulated the passage of a planetary mass that kicked their orbits inward.
Any planet in interstellar space will be a frozen ice ball.
In keeping with the article’s theme of MAY BE... Monkeys may fly out of my ears at any moment.
On a smaller scale, I believe they are called free radicals.
I know that astronomers have discovered some “clumping” in the Ort cloud that may be the result of something large stirring things up.
It 50 years old, I’m not too worried about it.
There is a theory that the moon was formed when a planetoid struck the Earth. Both the Earth and the planetoid disintegrated, and then reformed into two bodies: the current Earth and the Moon.
The Moon is too large of a body for the Earth to have captured via gravity, which gave rise to the collision theory.
The scientists have proposed that these life-bearing planets
Has any evidence been presented at all that they are life-bearing? So far we are 0-for-2 on detection of microscopic life on extraterrestrial bodies (moon and Mars) and zero for a lot more for detection of macroscopic life where we get close enough to various planets and moons to take detailed pictures of them.
originated in the early Universe within a few million years of the Big Bang,
For a planet to be anything other than a gas giant like Jupiter, there have to be elements heavier than hydrogen and helium. I don't know when the first stars when supernova, but the planets would have had to have formed after than to have any chance to have carbon, nitrogen, oxygen or even heavier elements like silicon or iron in them.
and that they make up most of the so-called “missing mass” of galaxies.
I've seen estimates that up to 90% of the mass is "missing". Since Jupiter is about one one-thousandth of the mass of the sun, that means you would need ten thousand missing Jupiter size planets for every sun sized star to account for the mass this way.
and during each transit, zodiacal dust, including a component of the solar system’s living cells,
What living cells? Have we ever found even one extraterrestrial cell? Just one? Then why is it assumed that they exist?
Duh. They all self-sustain heat due to global warming.
=]
Well, they had to put the planet factory somewhere, and The Oort Cloud is a goldmine of 'matter'.
They prepared by driving their SUVs for five billion years to keep their planets warm.
does mitt romney’s planet kolob have a star to orbit around, or is it simply awaiting for mittens to ordained a GOD so that it can revolve around mitt ... in all his glory ? /sarcasm-off with mega hurl aydded for effect ...
“The scientists have proposed that these life-bearing planets originated in the early Universe within a few million years of the Big Bang, and that they make up most of the so-called “missing mass” of galaxies.”
Goodbye ‘dark matter’, Hello ‘missing mass’.
So... maybe there will be a lot of penguins there. And polar bears.
“Space 1999” called it first.
Each week, our moon went zipping all over the galaxy.
These components would have been sterilized by the solar wind. Any DNA that would have existed in what would have been living cells that may have survived the trip out of the atmosphere would be blasted in to incoherent and inert dust by the solar wind within short period of time unless shielded by being buried very deep inside a very large rock.
Any rock large enough to be shielding for life would be superheated by impacting a wandering planet again destroying that life.
The idea that a wandering lifeless planet could pick up life by drifting by a life bearing planet seems to me pretty far fetched.
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