This post made me imagine a nightmare scenario where Earth is ejected and we can only helplessly watch as the sun becomes smaller and smaller.
this post was submitted on 05 Apr 2025
44 points (95.8% liked)
Astronomy
4722 readers
40 users here now
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
There are NO planets that don't orbit stars : once they don't orbit a star they don't follow the modern definition of a planet anymore
The modern definition of "planet" only includes things that orbit the sun.
Honestly, the IAU's definition of a planet is pretty useless.
We'll not have science in this discussion about science!
Rocky planets, gas giant planets, ice giant planets, dwarf planets, super Earth planets, hycean planets, lava planets, rogue planets...
Very interestingly, they found that systems with fewer planets tend to exit their “ejection” phase after about 100 million years, but systems with 10 planets are still unstable even after a billion years. They also found that these more bountiful systems actually eject the majority of their planets, losing 70 percent after a billion years. Most of the ones ejected are lower-mass, as expected.
Wonder how many sibling planets we had when our solar system first formed. This sort of topic is always fascinating to me.