On Nov 20, 1:51*am, Brad Guth wrote:
On Nov 18, 12:49*pm, Orval Fairbairn
wrote:





In article
,
*bob haller wrote:

On Nov 15, 7:53 pm, Brad Guth wrote:
On Nov 14, 10:23 am, wrote:

"In images, it doesn t look like much: just a blue dot
against the black of space. What s exciting about this
little planet is that it has somehow manage to escape
its star.

Even getting an image of the object, dubbed
CFBDSIR2149, is a pretty good trick: CFBDSIR2149
is only visible in the infrared, and then, only just (it
appears blue in the image because methane in its
atmosphere absorbs much of its longer infrared
wavelengths, the ESO says).

Astronomers using the European Southern
Observatory s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile
worked with the Canada-France-Hawaii (CFH)
Telescope in Hawaii to capture the image of the free-
floating planet, which is around 100 light years away.
The CFH instruments first spotted CFBDSIR2149,
and the VLT was called on to examine its properties."

See:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/11...potted_by_eso/

Yes indeed, a much bigger and hot sister or mother planet to that of
Venus is caught roaming about on the loose (unbound from any star):
And if the discovery team is right about CFBDSIR2149's age, the body
is likely a planet, with an average temperature of 806 degrees
Fahrenheit (430 degrees Celsius), researchers said.

The free-floating object, called CFBDSIR2149, is likely a gas giant
planet four to seven times more massive than Jupiter, scientists say
in a new study unveiled today (Nov. 14)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CFBDSIR2149-0403

Of course planets smaller than this one or those existing as moons of
the really big ones like CFBDSIR2149 are going to remain as undetected
until our existing astronomy instruments can be fine-tuned and/or
improved upon, that is unless these nomad items should pass much
closer to us than 10 ly. Detecting a rogue/nomad Earth sized planet
that s only giving off 64 TW plus whatever heat artificially generated
that could easily double that to 128 TW, as such is going to be really
hard to spot unless getting within a light year, because the smaller
and cooler the item is making their unbound existence extremely
stealthy.

ESA s Herschel and eventually our spendy JWST should spot lots more of
these wandering nomad planets, that by some astrophysics accounting
are as populated as 1e5 per star, though mostly of orphaned planets
much smaller than Saturn and of everything else down to planetoids as
small as Ceres. Out of every hundred wandering nomads should be at
least one of those offering a viable Earth and/or Venus sized planet.