For the Avengers, the intergalactic threat of “Infinity” has faded. In issue #24.NOW, the suitable new jumping-on point for author Jonathan Hickman’s heady series, the team allows themselves to momentarily relax with target practice and beer pie. But in the Marvel Universe, there is no rest for the heroic! A new danger from space emerges.
A Universe of Projectiles
“Rogue planets,” massive objects that hurtle through the vastness without a gravitational tether, have been theorized to exist since at least since the 1990s, but examples could not be confirmed until recently. Observation of the nomads can be performed via gravitational lensing measurements, when the flicker of a star’s light is distorted as the body passes through our view of it, which is a tough task if you don’t already know what you’re looking for. Two of the most publicized recent identifications, those of the wanderers dubbed CFBDSIR2149 and PSO J318.5-22, were accomplished by detecting their faint, infrared heat signatures. Now at least one study suggests that rather than being unusual anomalies, rogue planets may actually outnumber their “traditional” counterparts 100,000 to 1.
Artist’s conception of PSO J318.5-22, thought to be “only” six times the size of Jupiter.
Artist’s depiction of a brown dwarf, which is much larger than a gas giant planet, but just small enough that it can’t achieve the nuclear fusion that powers more familiar stars. Image from dailygalaxy.com
Collision Course
Upon learning that the Earth is square in the crosshairs of an oncoming rogue planet, the ever suspicious Hawkeye concocts a neat conspiracy theory about a culprit.
It’s called the “void” for a reason.
So if you mash those two enormities together, you’re bound to find a planet somewhere that happens, just by chance, to be the target of a celestial body gone wild. Why Earth? Why not? To say that just because something is screaming toward us we must have been targeted is like some kind of reverse anthropic principle; the universe has been fine-tuned for DEATH.
Yet it is staggeringly unlikely, which made the Nibiru nonsense of 2012 all the more silly. As one of the myriad doomsday predictions of that year, plenty of paranoid people imagined a celestial juggernaut named Nibiru bearing down on us from the great beyond. NASA senior scientist David Morrison, who hosts an “Ask an Astrobiologist” column on the organization’s website, had to field upwards of 25 questions about the figment every week in the years leading up to the non-apocalypse.
Artist’s depiction of…absurdity. Sorry, doomsday preppers.
It Gets Worse.
So you can breathe easy that we likely won’t be facing an extinction level threat from a rogue planet anytime soon. I probably shouldn’t mention there are hypervelocity stars zipping around our galaxy, too. We’ve seen at least 16, moving at 2 million miles per hour, which have likely been slingshotted by the titanic gravity of Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way. Oh, and I really shouldn’t say anything about the black holes that themselves go crashing through galaxies.
A runaway supermassive black hole looks to be ruining the days of any inhabitants in the CID-42 star system.
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