Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Just came across an interesting paper which seems to be exciting some comment: “Properties of Free Floating Planets Ejected through Planet-Planet Scattering.”

The abstract suggests that most planetary systems eject a few planets in the first billion years or so after their formation, with the ejected planets becoming “rogue” or “free-floating” planets in interstellar space.

The current Architect of Worlds models do allow for some ejection of planets in the formation process, especially in the case of a “Nice Event” that scrambles the orbits of core-accretion planets in the outer system. This paper seems to suggest that the process is a bit more common and aggressive than the current Architect models would suggest. I’m bookmarking this paper for close reading later – it’s a good candidate for being taken into account in a putative second edition of Architect.