Bizarre Rogue 'Planet' with Incredible Auroras Puzzles Scientists

This depiction indicates a gas giant. I guess the article didn’t state whether it was or wasn’t.

The exciting thing about locating planets with magnetic fields is that you can potentially live there and not get fried by radiation. The problem with this planet in particular is that you would weigh an awful lot and your widdle wegs would go SNAP!

Interesting how Clarke used his formidable imagination to try to visualize creatures that could exist under conditions of planets orbiting of the most astounding and bizarre stars that were known to astronomers of the early 1950s, when he wrote Childhood's End.

That was before quasars had been discovered, before black holes, before magnatars, before accretion disks, or dark energy, or dark matter, or neutrino oscillation, or x-ray stars, or event horizons, or star-quakes deep in the interiors of neutron stars... before any of these things were known, or (in many cases) even dreamed of.

What would Clarke have imagined today, were he alive and in his prime?

Science has advanced at such an astounding rate in the last fifty years. Fifty years before Clarke wrote this book, Pluto had not been discovered, and wouldn't be for another 27 years. Heavier-than-air flying machines had just been created. Radio was in its very infancy, and the idea of sending images wirelessly would have been seen as preposterous.

DNA hadn't been discovered; none of its discoverers — Watson, Crick, or Rosalind Franklin — had even been born yet. Neither quantum mechanics or relativity had been heard of, although both were gestating inside the brain of Albert Einstein.

I vaguely remember reading this...............

It made such a deep impression on me, at age 13.

We had a wonderful opportunity, when I was in eighth grade. The school district allowed a local man who owned a string of bookstores to teach a small group of children once a week. There were only eight kids in the class, out of about six hundred in the school; you had to write a short story to be admitted.

The guy loved science fiction, and every week would give each of us a brand-new book! I loved them so much; they were so new, they smelled like the printing presses at the publisher. We were the first to touch them; they were absolutely perfect, clean and unopened.

It was a wonderful time, and the school district I was in had very imaginative and creative administrators.

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