Astronomuy--stars

nohorn | 06:00 Sun 03rd Apr 2011 | Science

9 Answers

If you look up into the night sky, and see the stars (suns) do they all have planets orbiting around them? Some do and some don't ? Or all most likley do?

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MOS 3.4.11

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boxtops

That's a huge question! Individual planets in our solar system (the ones which don't twinkle) do have planets (but not all of them) - we are still learning about stars and suns in other solar systems. If you were out in space far away, our sun would be a twinkling star to you, in the middle of our own solar system.

Huderon

Some do for sure, others ... who knows ? But you might like this image anyway http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap110329.html

jomifl

Stars may have planet, planets may have moons. At present it is only possible to detect large planets orbiting nearby stars. When the technology for detecting planets improves we will have a better idea of how many stars have planets and what their sizes are.

Red_John

a lot have planets a lot don't. a good proportion of them are binary systems, ie 2 stars orbiting a common centre of gravity. Imagine being on a planet orbiting a star in a binary system!

tiggerblue10

I'm sure millions of them do but they are probably too small to detect. It hasn't been that long that several dwarf planets were detected beyond Neptune and Pluto.

Clanad

As tigger says, in the scheme of things, there are millions but that still translates to their being extremely rare... for a number of reasons...

nohorn

Question Author

Thank you to all who responded. I enjoy having the answers to something I have been wondering about. I apologize for the typo in the lead sentence.
Nohorn

Quizmonster

There's one particular patch of fuzzy light in the night sky that you might imagine is just a star, but it is in fact the Andromeda galaxy. According to New Scientist magazine, it contains a trillion stars and astronomers reckon there may well be 100 billion such galaxies.
So, a hundred billion trillion stars may well exist! Even if some of them don't have planets, one could well say that the number which DO have them must be positively "astronomical"!