Nomad Planets Roam The Milky Way

When I was a Freshman at Mount Holyoke College, I put on a “Movie Night” the film was about a group of “Spirits” that roam the earth, intermittently inhabiting human bodies. The movies was titled “Nomads” and I still remember it because of a fake Lesbian allusion, by one of the researchers.  Hollywood portrayed this by having one woman’s body being possessed by a male spirit, who proceeds to put the moves on the woman of his desires.


Worse use of lesbian SUBTEXT in Cinematic history, needless to ay my doorm mates took control and changed the movie.
Now whenever I see the word: NOMAD, my curiosity is piqued. 
.Researchers estimate planets that don't orbit a sun could greatly outnumber the stars in the Milky Way and speculate that these nomad planets could harbor bacterial life.
 

An artist's rendition of a nomad planet.
 
(Credit: Greg Stewart /SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory at Stanford)
In the search for planets, astronomers have traditionally hunted around stars. But a new study estimates that planets that don't orbit stars could be far more plentiful than previously thought. 
 
The Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology (KIPAC) at Stanford reported yesterday that new methods have dramatically raised the estimate of "nomad planets" in the Milky Way. There could be 100,000 more free-floating planets than stars in the galaxy. 
 
Though they don't have the sun's energy to support life, some of these planets could have the conditions to support--and spread--microbial life through a combination of a thick atmosphere and heat generated by radioactive decay from the planet itself. 
 
"If any of these nomad planets are big enough to have a thick atmosphere, they could have trapped enough heat for bacterial life to exist," Louis Strigari, who led research on the project, said in a statement. His team published a paper in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society on the new estimate. 
 
A technique called gravitational lensing, which measures changes in light from the gravity of planets, has identified hundreds of sun-orbiting stars in the galaxy.

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