[Diana in Wisconsin]

Question for those much smarter than me:

Are ALL ‘stars’ actually ‘suns’ like ours, with little planets around them?

If not, why not?

Discuss...

[Diana in Wisconsin]

And, another:

I thought I read somewhere that Orion’s ‘belt’ is actually a little ‘star factory’ where a lot of stars are born.

True or false?

Discuss...

[DannyTN]

sun

noun
1.
the star around which the earth orbits.
2.
the light or warmth received from the earth’s sun.
“we sat outside in the sun”
synonyms: sunshine, sunlight, daylight, light, warmth;

[Telepathic Intruder]

I would answer that but I probably don’t qualify.

[libertylover]

I’m pretty sure that not all stars have planets orbiting around them.

[LibWhacker]

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.

[Larry Lucido]

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?

[LibWhacker]

Here's a YouTube video (~ 1 min) that compares the sun to a few larger stars out there. And note, the sun is no pipsqueak; it's in the 75th percentile, larger than 3/4ths of all stars.

[Conan the Librarian]

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).