Just a few decades ago, when we glanced skyward, we didn’t know for certain whether any star visible to the naked eye hosts planets like our own. Now, NASA scientists estimate that, on average, there may be at least one planet for every star in the Milky Way. That’s billions of extrasolar planets in our island universe alone — not to mention the billions of stars in the trillions of other galaxies in the cosmos.
Of the more than 5,000 exoplanets that have been confirmed so far and many more thousands of candidates, most orbit stars the mass of the Sun or lower. The spring night sky, however, offers us several examples of bright stars larger than the Sun thought to host planets. Let’s look at a few and use…
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Astronomy (Digital) - 1 Issue, May 2025