Zetas RIGHT Again! : Wandering Planets
In early 1995, in one of the first ZetaTalk writeups, ZetaTalk described
the
12th Planet as a Wandering Planet
(http://www.zetatalk.com/science/s04.htm)
spending most of its time hovering between two suns. In the March-April
of 2002, the American Scientist reported that scientists had recently
been astonished to find such wandering planets.
Why does the 12th Planet swing so far away
from your Solar System, and why bother to
return, having done so? There is a balance
between the attraction of your Sun and another,
unseen by you but nevertheless present and in
force. The 12th Planet travels interminably
between these two forces, not able to settle on
an orbit around just one because of the momentum
and path it originally took. It is caught. The path
of the 12th Planet is such that it spends most of
its life out in dark space, slowly moving from
one giant tug to another.
ZetaTalk, [Planet X]
Free-Floating Planets and Stellar Clusters
American Scientist, Vol 90, Mar-Apr, 2002
For centuries a planet has been defined as an
object that orbits a star. This notion was
recently upended when several groups of
astronomers reported the discovery of
planet-sized objects wandering through space
on their own, with no parent star in sight. The
discovery of these objects within dense stellar
clusters has unsettled the astronomical community
and raised questions about the nature of planets
and how they might form. Jarrod R. Hurley and
Michael M. Shara review these recent discoveries
and consider how the dynamic interactions
between the stars in a dense stellar cluster may
free planets from the gravitational bondage of
their parent stars. Jarrod Hurley is a postdoctoral
investigator at the American Museum of Natural
History. His research involves studying the
evolution of star clusters through computer
simulations. His models have helped to explain
the formation of blue-straggler stars in the open
cluster M67, and he has recently begun to
investigate the behavior of planetary systems in
star clusters. Michael Shara is curator and chair
of the Department of Astrophysics at the
American Museum of Natural History. His
research interests include the structure and
evolution of novae and supernovae, collisions
between stars, and the nature of stellar
populations in star clusters and galaxies.