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Ephemeris: 07/15/2024 – When planets go rogue

July 15, 2024

This is Ephemeris for Monday, July 15th. Today the Sun will be up for 15 hours and 13 minutes, setting at 9:25, and it will rise tomorrow at 6:12. The Moon, 2 days past first quarter, will set at 1:40 tomorrow morning.

We all know that there are stars and there are planets and planets orbit stars, right? Well maybe not. Astronomers have recently discovered planets that don’t orbit stars. They float free in interstellar space. They are called rogue planets. There seems to be two ways to produce a rogue planet. The first way is to have the planet ejected from a star system through gravitational interaction with other planets especially big ones like Jupiter. Also, it appears that rogue planets can form like stars, and have protoplanetary discs. Or proto-moon disks? They can be discovered by the infrared light they give off, or by gravitational microlensing of a star that passes directly behind them.

The astronomical event times given are for the Traverse City/Interlochen area of Michigan (EDT, UT–4 hours). They may be different for your location.

Addendum

This is a NASA "travel poster" for exoplanet PSO J318.5-22
This is a NASA “travel poster” for exoplanet PSO J318.5-22. It is a rogue planet seven times the mass of Jupiter and shines a dull red because it’s only 12 million years old and still hot from the heat of formation. It is considered a brown dwarf, still a planet but with not enough mass to become a star. So the night time revelers shown in this travel poster would be doing so on the space stations shown orbiting it.
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