Saturday, 18 February 2012

Is it possible for a moon to orbit a planet floating free in the galaxy rather than orbiting a star

The answer is Yes.. Planets that don't orbit around a star are known as Rogue Planets. There is nothing preventing a rogue planet from having one or many moons.



Not so long ago, the first candidate for a free-floating exoplanet-exomoon system was presented in this paper. It looks like a gas giant several times larger than Jupiter with a sub-Earth mass moon.



Another study calculated and simulated scenarios where planets where ejected from their orbits around a star and concluded that around five percent of Earth-sized planets who are accompanied by Moon-sized natural satellites would retain them after the event.

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