this post was submitted on 05 Apr 2025
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Astronomy

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Most Planets in the Cosmos Probably Don’t Orbit Stars (www.scientificamerican.com)
submitted 4 days ago by cm0002@lemmy.world to c/astronomy@mander.xyz
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[–] some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org 5 points 3 days ago

Very interestingly, they found that systems with fewer planets tend to exit their “ejection” phase after about 100 million years, but systems with 10 planets are still unstable even after a billion years. They also found that these more bountiful systems actually eject the majority of their planets, losing 70 percent after a billion years. Most of the ones ejected are lower-mass, as expected.

Wonder how many sibling planets we had when our solar system first formed. This sort of topic is always fascinating to me.