link to Home Page

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.