Posted on 04/03/2019 2:52:41 PM PDT by LibWhacker
By the way, I just remembered this, a million or so years from now the Orion Nebula will be a bright star cluster, much brighter than the Pleiades. Collectively, the brightest thing in the sky besides the sun and moon. But I don’t know if this matters, not being a million years in the future.
I’m going to take on your question, though I definitely do not claim to be smarter than you. So you might want to stop reading right here, lol!
All stars are “like” our sun in that they put out their own light because of nuclear fusion taking place in their cores. But the similarity ends there. There is a huge variance, or variability, in the population of stars out there, in their mass, temperature, size, age, etc. There are short YouTube videos that show the variance in the size of stars.
I think most if not all stars are believed to have planets. But of course, some stars might not have planets because none ever formed (hard to believe), or were swept out of existence by nearby orbiting binary companions.
I’m no astronomer but I once stayed in a Holiday Inn Express next to a bowling alley.
I figure thusly. Our sun contains, as I understand, around 99.8% of the solar system’s mass. Jupiter contains most of the rest. The remainder was still enough to spawn Saturn and the other planets and asteroids and moons.
So, unless there are really, really greedy and efficient stars out there, I’m going to say that virtually every star has at least one rocky planet-sized thing revolving around it, either from leftover atoms or wandering planets that happened by and got captured during the several-billion years the star may have been around.
Earl Anthony (RIP) would have concurred, I’m sure.
Anyone disagree?
There is that, too.
The Nebular theory says that spin is a factor. If a star forms with almost no spin at all, very little leftover debris should be present. What qualifies as a ‘planet’? Pluto doesn’t pass only because it hasn’t cleared its orbit. A system with very little leftover debris won’t contain any planets according to our definition.
More like 90%. 3/4 of all stars are red dwarfs, not even visible from earth. Another 12% are K class. The sun is a brightish G class.
This is old news. If you study Algol (THE eclipsing binary) with detailed photometey, you can see the effects of the bright star being eclipsed by the dimmer, then they get brighter as the light from the brighter star reflects off the dimmer, then there is a dimming as the dimmer star goes into eclipse, cutting off the reflected light from the dimmer star.
Not all stars will have planets, but, a star is a star.
The variations from one star to another comes from age, volume and location.
Really old stars tend to be red stars, big stars tend to age rapidly, and, stars in orbit around each other tend to have weird things happen due to gravity (small, dense stars drawing matter off the bigger, less dense stars).
Right you are, thanks! For some reason, 75% was stuck in my brain. That’ll teach me to always double check my facts before putting them down on paper! Getting old is a b***h!
Can’t afford to stay at a Holiday Inn Express, so I had to look up Nebular Theory. Quite interesting. Thanks.
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I'm going to SPARE you a rebuttal Larry and just say that your comment was a STRIKE out......
Don’t double check your facts. 75% was close enough for most. I’m just a nit picker today it seems.
You’re not going to pin that on me!
Yeah, in a nutshell, whatever debris doesn’t share a ‘common’ angular momentum will collide, cancel out, and fall to the center. Our own sun must have formed from a nebula that had some spin applied to it, from a passing star or whatever. As the nebula collapsed under gravity, it spun faster like a ballerina, and anything not sharing the ‘preferred’ spin didn’t survive long. But that’s only a tiny percentage of the total mass.
You're lucky you're my friend so I'll spare you any further strikes against your comment.
This isn’t new at all. I’ve been teaching this in my astronomy class for years. It is a standard part of binary star light curve analysis. Has been for many years.
“...the Orion Nebula, which is a star factory.”
That’s the one. :)
“But I don’t know if this matters, not being a million years in the future.”
I’m marking my Calendar! We’ll have a beautiful view of it, ‘from above.’ :)
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