At first glance, astronomers seem to bite off more than they can chew if they try to discover the exact number of planets in the Universe. There are trillions of galaxies out there, each of them having hundreds of billions of stars. Therefore, there should be even more planets.
Surely planets don’t just pop out about anywhere and at any time out there in the vastness of the Cosmos. If we consider our beloved planet Earth, we have to keep in mind that it first took shape about 8.5 billion years after the Big Bang. Our planet became habitable only after a few hundred million years.
However, a new study brings a surprising result.
Planet-making discs could survive for at least 5 million years around some stars
ScienceNews reveals what a new scientific study has to say after researchers analyzed young star clusters located nearby: in the case of most stars, planets may have a lot more time to form than it was previously thought. A few million years more, to be more precise!
If the new findings are correct, it means that discs gathering around most stars and having the potential to give birth to new planets can lead to the formation of these latter cosmic structures in 5 to 10 million years. Previously, it was thought that the estimated period was around 1 to 3 million years.
Susanne Pfalzner, an astrophysicist of Forschungszentrum Jülich in Germany, explained as the same publication mentioned above quotes:
One to three megayears is a really strong constraint for forming planets,
Finding that we have a lot of time just relaxes everything” for building planets around young stars.
So far, astronomers have discovered “only” about 5,000 exoplanets in the Universe, meaning planets revolving around other stars except for our Sun.
