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The Horrifying Fate of Abandoned Worlds
Certain doom awaits those who wander the void alone
The vision is chilling: a world with no sun, cast adrift in the vastness of space, blanketed in an eternal darkness and doomed to lose every last watt of heat it possesses. The freeze, once it comes, will be unending; an icy grip that strangles the planet and extinguishes hope forever.
This horrifying fate may have befallen thousands, if not millions, of worlds in our galaxy. Astronomers name the victims “rogue planets”: abandoned worlds floating forever across an uncaring cosmos. A handful have already been found, mostly by sheer chance as they happen to drift past our solar system.
They are hard to detect. Most techniques for finding exoplanets rely on the presence of an easily visible star. Planets create regular disturbances as they orbit their parent star, disturbances that astronomers have learned to spot. For planets adrift in the void, however, these techniques are useless.
The few that we have seen were hot planets, newly formed worlds that have yet to lose the heat of creation. Telescopes can pick up their glow, which reveals them to curious astronomers. But this accounts for a tiny fraction of the planets that should surely be out there.
