Let's say there's a solar system somewhere in a galaxy and the star of that system reaches the end of its life-cycle. The star may collapse into a black hole, or it may explode into a supernova, but what happens to the planets? Do they get vaporized or sucked into the black hole? Or is it possible there are billions of dead planets in the universe, planets that didn't get destroyed by their sun's demise, but instead just became lonely wanderers outside the gravitational grasp of any particular sun?
We're only about 31 years or so into finding the first exoplanets, and we're beginning to find earth-sized planets orbiting other stars. It seems that it will be a long time before we might discover a planet that has been "orphaned" by its once powerful sun and is aimlessly wandering the galaxy that once contained its solar system.
Just wondering…
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I am no astronomer, but..
Black holes formed from stars are still remnants of supernovae. It just takes a much more massive star to be able to collapse down to that level. If it's large enough to supernova, but not leave a black hole, the corpse is a neutron star. So can a planet survive a supernova? Well I think yes with the right conditions, NASAs exoplanet archive lists a small handful of exoplanets around Pulsars, a rapidly spinning neutron star. These sound rare so conditions would probably have to be perfect, and the farther the planets orbit, the greater chance it has to survive, though likely still with damage. In a hypothetical, if you were to replace a star of 1 solar mass (like the sun) with a 1 solar mass black hole, nothing much would change gravitationally. So with a black hole formed from a supernova, it would not start consuming the planets, in fact it would be less massive than the original star, so the planets could possibly eventually be ejected due to their orbits being drastically changed, or settle in a different orbital distance around the black hole. This can also mean that if they did get too close to the black hole, they could eventually fall to its gravatational pull, or get flung out of its sphere of influence.
There are so many scenarios and and results
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They have found solar systems with dead planets around white dwarfs. I forget the episode, but I saw it on "How the Universe Works".
In this example the planets weren't vaporized, their husks were still orbiting their now dead star. I'm sure many other planets have met the same fate. I'm also aware of exoplanets that have been slung out of their solar system to wander the galaxy alone.
I believe most planets ultimate fate is to fall into their sun as it reaches the end of its main sequence and begins expanding. The drag on the planets' orbit causes them to spiral in.
If a star is large enough to collapse into a black hole, it probably wouldn't change the fate of the planets much since the stars mass wouldn't grow. Wherever the planet was orbiting at the time, as long as it survived the super nova, it's probably still orbiting its now dark star.
I love thinking about this stuff. Have you ever wondered why they never find exoplanets in globular clusters? Probably can't form in such a chaotic gravitational environment.
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I love thinking about this stuff. Have you ever wondered why they never find exoplanets in globular clusters? Probably can't form in such a chaotic gravitational environment. Have astronomers been looking for exoplanets in clusters? Wow, that would be a strange view of the night sky from a planet orbiting a star in a cluster!
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Interestingly the first detection of exoplanets was of three objects orbiting a pulsar back in 1992 ( https://www.nature.com/articles/355145a0). Of course these could have been captured after the supernova rather than surviving the blast Also if we're being loose in our definition of 'planet' a weird crystalline object was discovered around another pulsar in 2011 ( https://www.science.org/content/article/scienceshot-diamond-planet-orbits-pulsar) in this case it may be the remains of a white dwarf stripped of it's outer layers
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Jerry Gerber:
I love thinking about this stuff. Have you ever wondered why they never find exoplanets in globular clusters? Probably can't form in such a chaotic gravitational environment.
Have astronomers been looking for exoplanets in clusters? Wow, that would be a strange view of the night sky from a planet orbiting a star in a cluster! Yes, and they haven't found much. Now most globular clusters are further away than our closest stars, so they would be looking for gas giants. I'm not aware of any discoveries yet. I do keep up on this stuff more than I probably need to, haha.
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Jerry Gerber:
Let's say there's a solar system somewhere in a galaxy and the star of that system reaches the end of its life-cycle. The star may collapse into a black hole, or it may explode into a supernova, but what happens to the planets? Do they get vaporized or sucked into the black hole? Or is it possible there are billions of dead planets in the universe, planets that didn't get destroyed by their sun's demise, but instead just became lonely wanderers outside the gravitational grasp of any particular sun?
We're only about 31 years or so into finding the first exoplanets, and we're beginning to find earth-sized planets orbiting other stars. It seems that it will be a long time before we might discover a planet that has been "orphaned" by its once powerful sun and is aimlessly wandering the galaxy that once contained its solar system.
Just wondering... There maybe lots more live planets , although death is a universal constant , so don`t need to worry about it. Roger
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I'm no astronomer either so don't take every word I say to be 100% correct/accurate
Just to clarify, supernovas are the result of a star dying which forms either a black hole or a neutron star. In this process of the high mass star dying, the star will start to collapse under its own weight. The star collapses with such great force, it causes the core to shrink in size & thus become more dense. Depending on the force of the collapsing star (the higher the mass of the star is the greater the force will be), will determine if the pressurized core will become a black hole or neutron star. The vast majority of high mass stars won't to be able to produce the needed conditions for the black hole to form due to the shear force needed, & instead the majority will result in a neutron star. However a small percentage will become low mass black holes. The collapsing outer sections of the star will cause the core of the star to condense (creating either a black hole or neutron star) will then be reflected off the core & pushed back out, creating a supernova. This event is so incredibly bright it can be observed from atleast millions of light years away, & quite easily in some circumstances, showing the shear amount of energy produced.
Now to your question, the vast majority of planets in the given star system you could imagine would be destroyed due to there close proximity to there host star. It's maybe possible some of the outer planets with a fair distance from there star might survive & just lose there orbit, creating what is known as a rogue planet which is what you implied above. However the vast majority of planets would be destroyed in a instant.
Not exactly a rogue planet, but there are planets known to have survived supernova & still orbit there host star of which is now a Neutron star, an example being funny enough the first ever exo planet to be discovered (PSR B1257+12 B) of which actually was orbiting around a neutron star (a pulsar to be specific). Proving that planets can certainly survive supernovas, its just likely to be very rare & require very specific conditions. Because of this, I see no reason why a planet further out could survive but in this process lose their orbit due to the supernovas forces.
Its also possible that rogue planets could form through other means too! For example its possible in the early formations of star systems, planets gravitationally interacting which each other might manage to sling shot each other out of the local star system, creating again a rogue planet.
I hope this helps you out!
Clear skies,
Gabriel
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Gabriel Perano:
I'm no astronomer either so don't take every word I say to be 100% correct/accurate
Just to clarify, supernovas are the result of a star dying which forms either a black hole or a neutron star. In this process of the high mass star dying, the star will start to collapse under its own weight. The star collapses with such great force, it causes the core to shrink in size & thus become more dense. Depending on the force of the collapsing star (the higher the mass of the star is the greater the force will be), will determine if the pressurized core will become a black hole or neutron star. The vast majority of high mass stars won't to be able to produce the needed conditions for the black hole to form due to the shear force needed, & instead the majority will result in a neutron star. However a small percentage will become low mass black holes. The collapsing outer sections of the star will cause the core of the star to condense (creating either a black hole or neutron star) will then be reflected off the core & pushed back out, creating a supernova. This event is so incredibly bright it can be observed from atleast millions of light years away, & quite easily in some circumstances, showing the shear amount of energy produced.
Now to your question, the vast majority of planets in the given star system you could imagine would be destroyed due to there close proximity to there host star. It's maybe possible some of the outer planets with a fair distance from there star might survive & just lose there orbit, creating what is known as a rogue planet which is what you implied above. However the vast majority of planets would be destroyed in a instant.
Not exactly a rogue planet, but there are planets known to have survived supernova & still orbit there host star of which is now a Neutron star, an example being funny enough the first ever exo planet to be discovered (PSR B1257+12 B) of which actually was orbiting around a neutron star (a pulsar to be specific). Proving that planets can certainly survive supernovas, its just likely to be very rare & require very specific conditions. Because of this, I see no reason why a planet further out could survive but in this process lose their orbit due to the supernovas forces.
Its also possible that rogue planets could form through other means too! For example its possible in the early formations of star systems, planets gravitationally interacting which each other might manage to sling shot each other out of the local star system, creating again a rogue planet.
I hope this helps you out!
Clear skies,
Gabriel Thanks for the above explanation Gabriel!
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Here is a nice article from Astronomy magazine on what the night sky might look like (and its consequences for astronomy conducted by some imagined civilization on an imagined exoplanet) inside a globular cluster. A quote from the article: At the center, our planet would be surrounded by a few hundred stars per cubic light-year (several thousand stars per cubic pc), which is thousands of times the stellar density of the Sun’s neighborhood in the Milky Way’s suburbs. The typical distance from our hypothetical planet to the closest star, however, still would be substantial — about 0.05 light-year (0.015 pc). In our solar system, this would place it beyond the inner edge of the Oort Cloud of comets. Unless the closest stars happen to be red giants, none of them would have angular diameters large enough to resolve with the human eye, so all the stars still would appear as points of light. Across the entire sky, inhabitants of our hypothetical world would see 10,000 stars brighter than 1st magnitude — compared with just 29 in Earth’s sky — and more than a thousand brighter than Earth’s most brilliant nighttime star, Sirius. The brightest suns would blaze at apparent magnitudes brighter than –9, or 100 times more luminous than Venus appears from Earth. More than 130,000 stars would shine brighter than 6th magnitude, the naked-eye limit, compared with 6,000 from Earth Life inside a globular cluster.pdf |
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Arun H:
Here is a nice article from Astronomy magazine on what the night sky might look like (and its consequences for astronomy conducted by some imagined civilization on an imagined exoplanet) inside a globular cluster. A quote from the article:
At the center, our planet would be surrounded by a few hundred stars per cubic light-year (several thousand stars per cubic pc), which is thousands of times the stellar density of the Sun’s neighborhood in the Milky Way’s suburbs. The typical distance from our hypothetical planet to the closest star, however, still would be substantial — about 0.05 light-year (0.015 pc). In our solar system, this would place it beyond the inner edge of the Oort Cloud of comets. Unless the closest stars happen to be red giants, none of them would have angular diameters large enough to resolve with the human eye, so all the stars still would appear as points of light. Across the entire sky, inhabitants of our hypothetical world would see 10,000 stars brighter than 1st magnitude — compared with just 29 in Earth’s sky — and more than a thousand brighter than Earth’s most brilliant nighttime star, Sirius. The brightest suns would blaze at apparent magnitudes brighter than –9, or 100 times more luminous than Venus appears from Earth. More than 130,000 stars would shine brighter than 6th magnitude, the naked-eye limit, compared with 6,000 from Earth
Life inside a globular cluster.pdf I suppose that would mean the night sky on such a planet would be more like the "light sky"! There would be no darkness, except on cloudy nights if there are clouds on such a world. No doubt, a very crowded neighborhood.
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There's a paper in this week's Nature that may be of interest, describing a planet being swallowed by it's star (here's the associated News and Views that hopefully isn't behind the paywall https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-01385-3). There is also a link to an earlier paper from 2020 describing a planet identified by it's transit in front of a white dwarf https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02555-3 suggesting that planets can survive the red giant phase of sun-like stars
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