Do all stars have planets?

Are there lone stars or do they all have planetary families?

In 1992, astronomers discovered the first exoplanet, a planet from another star, outside the solar system. Since then, telescopes have detected thousands of exoplanets orbiting not just sun-like stars but also binary star systems, small cold stars called red dwarfs and even ultra-dense neutron stars.

It’s easy to imagine whether all stars have at least one planet in their orbit or whether there are lone stars. Speaking to Live Science, Jonathan Lunine, chairman of the Department of Astronomy at Cornell University, alma mater of famous astronomer Carl Sagan, these lonely stars exist. “It’s not known for sure, but the truth is that there are many stars in which planets have been researched – and none have been found so far.”

Scientists estimate that there are as many planets as there are stars in our galaxy, but these planets are not evenly distributed. Some stars like the Sun, like TRAPPIST-1, a red dwarf star located about 40 light-years away, are home to more than half a dozen planets, while others may have none.

But what makes one star host so many planets while others fly alone? Scientists believe it is due to the way the star formed. When young stars are forming, they are usually surrounded by a ring of dust particles. These particles collide with each other to form larger and larger clumps, which can eventually form planets. But not all young stars are so lucky.

If a star is formed from a group of interstellar clouds that rotate very quickly and that group contracts instead of rotating to form a disk, then it can break into two or more pieces and form a binary star system or a multiple star system. In these cases, planets may not form.

Binary star systems can form planets in some cases, such as Kepler-47 and its three planets, but the conditions must be right. In these systems, stellar material is divided into two groups, and then a disk forms around one or both of these groups.

Less often, a young star’s dust clump can spin so slowly that it simply collapses into a star without forming a disk. It’s also possible that one star forms planets and that another star’s intense gravity knocks them out of the solar system, or at least sends them too far away to be detected. This is what may have happened to the planet HD 106906 b, which revolves around a binary star system in an orbit 18 times farther from its star than Pluto is from the sun.

Photograph: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

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