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Life on a lonely planet

By catdynamics on October 24, 2007.

In the short story "A Pail of Air" by Leiber, the Earth is ejected into interstellar space.
The story describes the one family's struggle for survival as the atmosphere freezes out.

A few years ago, David Stevenson noted that such free floaters could sustain liquid water on the surface through geothermal heating, if the atmosphere was thick enough and of the right composition.

Now a smart, hard working postdoc and some random co-author have explore it further, looking at what happens to free floaters with Moons! Tidal heating may supplement geo heating long enough for live to become established and evolve, not just survive. Maybe.

Sky and Telescope has a nice article on the research

Such systems may be detectable in the finite future.

and there is a real paper

Not to be confused with the paper on how to find planets in collision, as opposed to ejection.

PS: damm. I had blogged this already, just a few weeks ago when the paper came out... I forgot, honestly. The S&T article coming out prompted me to do a short.
Clearly I am going senile.

Tags
astro

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that poor guy debes needs to start choosing more respectable collaborators...

In the paper, the scenario where the moon gets captured into orbit around the jovian planet is mentioned. Is the capture of the Earth-like planet itself into orbit around the jovian a plausible scenario, which could perhaps be a route to forming habitable moons if the jovian ends up at the right kind of distance from its star?

Mihos, just when I think I'm out, they pull me back in :)

Andy, in the simulations we did, no earth sized planet was convincingly placed in the same kind of orbit that we saw with the lunar companions. I think it's probably just easier to capture the smaller member of the pair, but Steinn might know a thing or two about dynamics and answer the question better.