Could Earth ever become a rogue planet?

[Admin]

Earth has held a stable orbit for over 4 billion years but what would happen if we changed Earth's orbit so to avoid the sun's violent demise?

Could Earth ever become a rogue planet? : Read more

 

[rod]

The article concludes with - "Astronomers estimate that there are somewhere between 0.25 and 10,000 rogue planets for every star, all drifting through the interstellar wastes of the Milky Way. That number is understandably broad, because we have precious few observations of rogue planets, and so it's difficult to construct solid statistics. But let's hope that our future descendants don't inadvertently add one more to the list."

When it comes to making prophecies of Earth's future, it is good to project the prophecy far into the future too like 500 million to 5 billion years from today

Rogue planet reports are out there in the publications, here is a recent example.

Astronomers uncover largest group of rogue planets yet, https://phys.org/news/2021-12-eso-telescopes-uncover-largest-group.html

Reference paper, A rich population of free-floating planets in the Upper Scorpius young stellar association, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-021-01513-x, 22-Dec-2021. "Abstract The nature and origin of free-floating planets (FFPs) are still largely unconstrained because of a lack of large homogeneous samples to enable a statistical analysis of their properties. So far, most FFPs have been discovered using indirect methods; microlensing surveys have proved particularly successful to detect these objects down to a few Earth masses1,2..."

My observation. From the abstract cited, "Therefore, ejections due to dynamical instabilities in giant exoplanet systems must be frequent within the first 10 Myr of a system’s life."

My note. All the possible rogue planets reported are dated very young in the area near the Sun studied (relative to the age of the Sun, some 4.6 billion years old), perhaps 10 million years old or less. One possible formation mechanism identified is ejection from other planetary systems that formed (obviously very recently too relative to the solar system age). This seems to require much catastrophism and violence during protoplanetary disk evolution events postulated to explain the origin of planets.

My note, from the phys.org report, "We did not know how many to expect and are excited to have found so many,".

This indicates that a specific origin model using gas clouds and protoplanetary disks, did not predict how many rogue planets could be found, so the exact formation of rogue planets is not certain, like heliocentric solar system astronomy. Example, measurements for the solar parallax based upon Mercury and Venus transits, used to define the distance between Earth and the Sun or observations of the phases of Venus. My note. The phys.org report states, the study suggests there could be many more rogue planets that have not been discovered. "There could be several billions of these free-floating giant planets roaming freely in the Milky Way without a host star," Bouy explains." My note. This suggest that billions of rogue planets may exist, free floating in the MW. Do observations like this impose constraints on the postulated evolutionary events in the solar, protoplanetary disk that Earth is said to evolve from? Example, what constrained our Earth from evolving, *naturally* into a wandering, rogue Earth in the MW?

My point here is simple. If we inquire about the Earth becoming a rogue planet in the far distant future in the solar system, how about explaining and demonstrating how Earth avoided becoming a rogue planet at the beginning in the solar nebula?

 

[Homer10]

If you steal some energy from Jupiter, then it's orbit would get smaller a little bit each time we used the rock to take a little energy. So Jupiter's orbit shrinks, and Earths orbit grows. This could cause all sorts of strange unpredictable resonances. Also the transition time would lend to unexpected results. A very dangerous thing indeed.

 

[Glaroon]

Robert Heinlein talked about moving planets in his 1951 Between Planets and I am sure there were others before him. But the process should not require a gravitational object as large as Jupiter. Much smaller objects over a longer period of time (millions of years even) should do the trick and tidal effects on Earth's geology (e.g. earthquakes) could then be better accommodated.