Researchers working on the Planet 9 question have uncovered some intriguing options for our potential distant planet. If it exists, it might not be from our neighborhood at all.

If Earth were to suddenly become a rogue planet, the planet would cool, and over the course of months or a year, the entire ocean would become covered in ice. That ice would act as an insulator ...

Even if a rogue planet came close to the Earth, the interaction may not even destroy the planet if there wasn't a direct hit. "It would need to come close enough to Earth to either collide with it ...

The new planet is a celestial bonbon, a dainty, rose-colored ice ball far smaller than tiny Pluto. Its detection helps confirm that the outer stretches of the solar system are a crowded place.

In a paper published in the International Journal of Astrobiology in 2019, they study how life might survive on a rogue planet in oceans underneath an outer ice layer. This ice layer would form if an ...

An illustration of an ice-covered rogue planet. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center At one time, astronomers believed that the planets formed in their current orbits, which remained ...

Neptune, an ice giant (a cold gas giant with a rocky, icy core), has a density less than water's. In contrast, as a rocky planet, ... PSO J318.5-22, a rogue planet with no star.

Back in 2016, headlines all over the world blared with news of a possible "alien megastructure" detected orbiting a distant Milky Way star. Now, a team of Columbia University astrophysicists has ...

Space A long-lost rogue planet could explain unexpectedly distant asteroids. The outer solar system holds some chunks of ice and rock that orbit so far from the sun it’s hard to imagine how they ...

A couple of decades ago, the idea of a rogue planet entering our solar system would have been the stuff of fantasy, but now we know it’s actually possible. In a recent paper, ...

A “rogue” exoplanet with the preliminary name PSO J318.5-22 has been detected by a group of astronomers led by Michael Liu from the University of Hawaii at Manoa. By “rogue planet ...

If it coalesced around Sol, Planet 9 is almost certainly an ice giant, smaller than Neptune, and so far from our sun that it could take 10,000 - 20,000 years to complete a single orbit.