You can fly to Starfield's planets without loading - if you've got seven hours spare

gamesradar.com:

A Starfield player spent seven hours flying to a single planet to prove a point.

Over the last weekend, streamer and Sony Santa Monica dev Alanah Pearce set out to prove a point: could they collide with a planet if they kept flying through space? In Starfield, you can't simply fly to different planets - you instead need to manually plot a course to them, and then teleport to a planet, with outer space basically acting as a platform from which you can fast travel down to planets.

I'm leaving my ship running while I sleep to see if I eventually collide with Pluto in some way, for science #starfield https://t.co/Q3QYptpf1eSeptember 2, 2023

Pearce left her starship flying at Pluto for seven hours while she slept, but was forced to wake up at half hour intervals, because it turns out planets are actually in orbit, and will change positions around the Sun. Starfield's planets might not physically be there as such, but they sure do move around space like they are.

The test results reveal that you can actually fly to planets in Starfield without loading! However, there's a massive catch: you can't actually enter the planets, instead you just clip through them, and then emerge out of them on the other side after a while longer of flying through them.

So yes, Starfield's planets are there in space, sort of. And you can fly to them without loading, sort of. It's a lot of dedication from Pearce to uncover this, and a lot of work from developers at Bethesda to pull off this 'smoke and mirrors' trick to make outer space seem more populated than it actually is.

In decidedly less positive discoveries, Starfield players have discovered dogs might have become extinct in the universe. What's even the point of adventuring to 1,000 planets