Have you heard about rogue planets?
Living on Earth: Superman of Astrophysics
Quote:
CURWOOD: Yeah, that I wanted to ask you about. And there’s something that I’d never heard of… a rogue planet?
TYSON: Oh yeah! Oh, you’ve never heard about the rogue planets? Well, we didn’t even think to think of these things until our models of the formation of the solar system showed us that if you start out with a star and a collapsing gas cloud making surrounding planets, you can make planets in all kinds of places in orbit around the host star, but not all of those places are orbitally stable.
And what we found was the solar system itself might have started with two, three dozen planets, and depending on where their orbits are relative to other planets, they might not maintain a stable, forever, orbit around their host star, and they can end up getting flung into interstellar space. And when this happens, they become rogue planets. Homeless planets. And what makes it interesting is some planets still have heat left over from when they formed.
Jupiter still has heat left over. Actually, it’s generating heat because it’s slowly collapsing so it radiates more heat than it receives from the sun. And of course Earth has all this heat from its geologic activity, we’ve got this magma sitting below the crust and all of this volcanic activity… that heat, that energy is not traceable to the sun. That’s born here on Earth. So you could imagine flinging a planet out into interstellar space, and still have energy there that could possibly sustain life.
So it’s been hypothesized that most life in the universe is found on rogue planets, where they don’t need a star. And we’re pretty sure that there are more rogue planets than planets that are in happy, stable orbits around host stars.
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So, there is a fairly good chance that there is life on a large rogue planet that has a totally different reference point for time than those lifeforms like us who live on an orbiting planet - they have no day and night, no seasons, no years - but they do have an ever changing view of the stars.
If that doesn't expand your mind, I don't know what would!