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Most Planets In the Universe Are Homeless
StartsWithABang writes: We like to think of our Solar System as typical: a central star with a number of planets — some gas giants and some rocky worlds — in orbit around it. Yes, there's some variety, with binary or trinary star systems and huge variance in the masses of the central star being common ones, but from a planetary point of view, our Solar System is a rarity. Even though there are hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy for planets to orbit, there are most likely around a quadrillion planets in our galaxy, total, with only a few trillion of them orbiting stars at most. Now that we've finally detected the first of these, we have an excellent idea that this picture is the correct one: most planets in the Universe are homeless. Now, thank your lucky star!"
don't planets need some kind of gravity source to pull all the dust and shit together?
so much resources out there for the taking, no need to come to earth
Planet is Greek for wanderer. So, I think the name is even more appropriate.
(FYI)
There are a few reasons astrophysicists know that it is extremely unlikely that dark matter is baryonic. First of all if all the stars in a galaxy shine on an object it heats up, this heat causes the release of radiation, called thermal radiation, and every (baryonic) object above zero kelvin (or -273.14 deg celcius) emits this radiation. However, dark matter does not emit any radiation at all (hence the name dark!)
If dark matter were baryonic it would also mean that it could become light emitting. If we got a clump of baryonic matter* and put it in space it would gravitationally contract, and would eventually form a star or black hole** - both of which we would be able to see.
So, because of these reasons the dark matter in galaxies and in galaxy groups/clusters cannot be baryonic, and so cannot be planets, dead stars, asteroids, etc. It would definetely not be planets as there is no way 10-100 times the mass of the stars in a galaxy would be planets, as the mechanism for making planets relies on supernovae, and the number of supernovae needed for the that many planets would be far too high to match our observations. I hope that this answered your question!
*provided the clump of baryonic matter was large, and the amount there is in galaxies definitely is!
** we don't observe black holes directly, but can see radiation from their accretion disks.
Systems composed of multiple stars (binaries, etc.) are more common than singular stars, like our Sun. A binary system is a risky place to be -- there is a strong probability that the gravitational interaction between the paired stars would, given enough time, eject any planetary body which forms there -- the "stable" regions depend on the orbital parameters of the two (or more) stars and can be limited to very narrow bands. So, if planetary formation is a typical process around stars and binaries are more common, then it's likely that the galaxy has a large population of planets ejected from unstable orbits around binaries.
For what it's worth, conjecture is that the Sun formed in a cluster and was, itself, ejected. Nearby stars with identical spectra (implying they formed from the same source material) have been identified.
A lot of physicists, including Neil deGrasse Tyson, have said that "Dark Matter" is actually a pretty poor name for the phenomenon because it's almost certainly not just some exotic form of matter
Unfortunately a lot more physicists talk about dark matter (in public anyway) as if it is actually matter of some sort despite the fact that we have no actual direct evidence that such a thing actually exists. Now maybe dark matter really does exist but all we have right now are some observations that don't match our models. Could be that our powers of observation are simply too limited in some way right now OR it could just as easily mean we have a flawed math model. I tend to think the latter is significantly more likely but obviously cannot rule out the former.
Physicists and scientists in general though are pretty bad at explaining concepts to the general public. I'm more educated than most people are with regard to physics and I have yet to find an explanation of the Standard Model that is even vaguely approachable to a layman such as myself. They also are pretty bad at communicating where the lines between what we know and what we do not know actually are.
As an example that worked out -- the neutrino was originally proposed as an unobserved, mysterious matter particle to avoid having to modify the laws of conservation of momentum and energy when applied to nuclear beta decays.