We have a pretty good idea of how planets form around stars with the confirmation of 5,000+ exoplanets.
Local dense knots of material in clouds of gas collapse and spin into a disk. The stuff in the center can form a star. A lot of the details I have skipped over are understood.
The Sun is a low-mass star. The system is stable enough to make stars. Problems are caused by bigger stars. The stars tend to blast out a lot of ultraviolet radiation, and this can cause the disk around them to evaporate, breaking up the chemical bonds in molecule and heating the gas so much it cannot form planets
The team is watching as massive stars blast away gas.
There are some huge stars with planets. It's likely that planets around massive stars are rare because of the flood of UV light. The more massive the star is, the less likely it is that some could form.
There are at least two giant stars that have planets.
The B-star AbundanceSTudy, or BEAST, is a project to find planets in the B-star constellation. Young star clusters that are less than 15 million years old are the best places to find massive stars. The Scorpius-Centaurus association contains hundreds of young stars just 400 light-years away from Earth.
There were two stars. One of the stars is 6-7 times the Sun's mass and the other is 1-2 times the Sun's mass. Neptune is only 30 times Earth's distance from the Sun, but it is a super-Jupiter that is 10 times as massive as Jupiter.
Two super-Jupiters are circling the second star, 2 Sco, which is a bruiser 9 times the Sun's mass. The Earth-Sun distance is less than the other one.
What is it that this can be done?
A team ofAstronomers ran simulations of the conditions inside an association They used 1000 stars with a realistic range of mass and gave planets to half of them. They allowed their motions to dictate how they behaved over the course of 10 million years.
There are two ways in which massive stars can acquire planets, one is to capture free-floating planets in the association and the other is to steal them from another star.
Seven planets were stolen directly and 11 free-floaters were captured. For every association with a thousand stars, you expect a planet that formed around a different star.
That is incredible. They noticed that captured free-floating planets tended to be more than 200 times the Earth-Sun distance away. Ones that were directly stolen had less space in their bodies.
It is most likely that the planet b Cen was captured after being ejected from its parent star. It is likely that the outer planet of 2 Sco is the same as the inner one, which is more likely to have been stolen.
You have to be careful with the simulations. Random noise can affect results like flipping a coin and getting heads. Fluctuations like that tend to smooth out the more times you run a sim. The ellipticity of the planetary orbits may change depending on how the star acquires it.
Lower mass stars and distant planets are1-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-6556 is1-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-6556 Were they pinched from close by stars? We don't know how many planets don't follow the same path as their parent star.
We haven't found planets around other stars yet. Hundreds of billions of them are in our universe alone. We will get better statistics on them as we find more. Not all of them will be found around their parent stars.
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