Scientists at Leiden University in the Netherlands have found that there may be billions of wandering planets in the Milky Way - celestial bodies that have a large mass, have a spherical shape, but are not gravitationally attached to any star. Such objects fly freely in outer space and can collide with other planets, including the Earth. This is reported by Science Alert.
The researchers carried out mathematical simulations of planetary systems that could be located in the Orion Trapezium, an open star cluster located in the Orion Nebula. The simulation consisted of five hundred Sun-like stars, each with four, five, or six planets. A total of 2522 planets were generated, the mass of which varied widely: from three Earth masses (super-Earth) to 130 Jupiter masses (brown dwarfs).
It turned out that 357 planets (16.5 percent) left their systems within 11 million years from the moment of their formation and began to drift in space. At the same time, 282 planets left the cluster, 75 collided with the parent star, and 34 with another planet. If the simulation results are extrapolated to the entire Milky Way, then the total number of wandering planets can reach 16.5-100 billion.
It is believed that the large angle of inclination of the axis of Uranus is associated with a collision with a freely flying space body the size of a planet. It is also possible that the as-yet-undetected ninth planet in the solar system was also an outcast until it was captured by the sun's pull.
