On 17/10/2012 10:42 AM, dlzc wrote:
Dear Brad Guth:

On Wednesday, October 17, 2012 6:10:07 AM UTC-7, Brad Guth wrote:
...
Stars w/o planets may soon become the exception,
because now we seem to have solar systems of
multiple suns with multiple planets.

I agree with you here. Now if Barnard's star was ejected from a system, will it have a planet?

If the planet were close enough to Barnard's star at the time of
ejection, it might have tagged along, but I suspect that there won't be
any around it, if it is an ejected star.


I suspect *all* stars have planets, and to be without is exceptional. The planets we can detect further away, have to have their ecliptic aligned pretty close to Earth for us to see them occulting their parent.

We're going back to the original method of discovering exo-planets,
using the wobble method, before Kepler made detecting transiting planets
as easy as shooting fish in a barrel. It's nice to have a refinement in
the older more difficult methods coming back with interesting results
that we'd never have discovered were it not for mere alignment.

Yousuf Khan