Is it possible to have multiple suns

With the slow fascination of fear, he lifted himself on one arm and turned his eyes toward the blood-curdling blackness of the window.

Through it shone the Stars! Not Earth's feeble thirty-six hundred Stars visible to the eye; Lagash was in the center of a giant cluster. Thirty thousand mighty suns shone down in a soul-searing splendor that was more frighteningly cold in its awful indifference than the bitter wind that shivered across the cold, horribly bleak world. But back in reality: The new observations means that the search for extraterrestrial planets just expanded to include triple-star systems.

Who knows, someday we may ask the inhabitants of another planet what it's like to live under the light of multiple suns. However, astronomers recently discovered that a whopping 25 to 50 percent of these planets actually may have misaligned orbits. For instance, perhaps it was a gravitational tug of war between exoplanets that hurled some inward at their stars. Still, it seemed unlikely such processes were responsible for all these misaligned planets. Now Batygin has discovered protoplanetary disks can indeed produce such tilted orbits if these systems each harbored multiple stars.

Although the solar system has only one sun, most stars like Earth's sun are binaries— two stars orbiting each other as a pair. Increasingly, astronomers are discovering planetary systems with twin suns like Luke Skywalker's fictional home planet Tatooine in "Star Wars". We have found stars that are times bigger in diameter than our sun. Truly, those stars are enormous. We have also seen stars that are just one tenth the size of our sun. Our Sun is a little unusual because it doesn't have any friends.

It's just one Sun surrounded by planets, asteroids, comets, and dwarf planets. But solar systems can have more than one sun. In fact, that's often the case. More than half of all stars are in multiple star systems.

Create your free account or Sign in to continue. See Subscription Options. Discover World-Changing Science. What indeed is the difference between a big planet and a small star? The recent discovery of massive planets around other stars has aroused a lot of debate on this very point.

Alan P. Boss of the Carnegie Institution of Washington is one of the theorists trying to clarify which bodies qualify as planets and which as so-called "brown dwarfs"-objects smaller than stars but fundamentally unlike planets.

He answers the question as follows: "Nearly all scientists who study the formation of planets believe that Jupiter formed in a very different manner than stars form, so that calling Jupiter a 'failed star' is misleading.