Life on a brown dwarf or a fissioning rouge planet?

Loren Booda

Is life on a brown dwarf or a rogue planet with a fissioning core any less feasible than life in a solar system?

franznietzsche

On a brown dwarf, which would be very likely a gas giant, the lack of solvents makes life unlikely (barring some sort of giant rocky core with a vast extended atmosphere, but the composition of interstellar clouds makes such a formation unlikely. There is far far more hydrogen and helium than anything else so forming a rocky brown dwarf seems unlikely (not impossible I suppose, but exceedingly rare). Although, if you define life as merely replicating chemical structures (like DNA or RNA), governed by the rule of natural selection and evolution (though this is somewhat putting the cart before the horse if one defines lifeforms as things that evolve) it might be possible for such reactions to be carried out in an atmosphere. I don't know though.

A rogue planet that provides enough heat internally could support life, it wouldn't be all that different from the environments found deep in the earth's crust, or volcanic ocean vents I imagine. Whether life could arise in such conditions might be a different issue from whether or not it can be supported though.

DaveC426913

You can't imagine how disappointed I was, to open this thread and find out that "rouge planet" was just a typo.