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Posted on 02/05/2026 6:39:37 AM PST by Salman
Of the more than 4,500 stars known to have planets, one puzzling statistic stands out. Even though nearly all stars are expected to have planets and most stars form in pairs, planets that orbit both stars in a pair are rare.
Of the more than 6,000 extrasolar planets, or exoplanets, confirmed to date - most of them found by NASA's Kepler Space Telescope and the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) - only 14 are observed to orbit binary stars. There should be hundreds. Where are all the planets with two suns, like Tatooine in Star Wars?
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... Over time, tidal interactions between the binary pair shrink the orbit, which has two effects: The precession rate of the stars increases, but the precession rate of the planet slows. When the two precession rates match, or resonate, the planet's orbit becomes wildly elongated, taking it farther from the star but also nearer at its closest approach.
"Two things can happen: Either the planet gets very, very close to the binary, suffering tidal disruption or being engulfed by one of the stars, or its orbit gets significantly perturbed by the binary to be eventually ejected from the system," said Mohammad Farhat, a Miller Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Berkeley and first author of the paper. "In both cases, you get rid of the planet."
That doesn't mean that binary stars don't have planets, he cautioned. But the only ones that survive this process are too far from the stars for us to detect with transit techniques used by Kepler and TESS.
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(Excerpt) Read more at spacedaily.com ...
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Dumb question: Did our sun ever have a companion star?
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20241223-the-search-for-the-suns-missing-twin
I don't think the Wayback Machine goes back that far.
Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system, would need over ten times more mass to become a brown dwarf star and eighty times more mass to become a red dwarf star.
Nice twofer!
Obviously, such stars formed separately and wandered on into a binary arrangement because of peer pressure. Most stars are cis-solared.
Related keyword: Rogue planets.
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When Isaac Newton invented gravity, did he realize how complicated it was going to get? Resonating precession rates?
“When Isaac Newton invented gravity,”
That’s amazing. Before Newton, how did people walk around with both feet firmly affixed to the ground?
What hubris!
I was using the original meaning of "invent" from the Latin invenire, "to find out" or "to discover."
“Dumb question: Did our sun ever have a companion star?”
I don’t know. But ask Keith Richards. He might.
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