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Comment by recursive | Hacker News Reader

I suspect in any solar system, the mass of the non-stars are a rounding error compared to the whole system's mass.

I suspect the current contents of a solar system is a poor proxy for everything that’s been ejected from it. Pluto is 0.0006 light-years from the sun, there’s a great deal of space between stars we don’t know that much about.

Further we dramatically underestimated the number of expo planets for decades. Quite reasonably we don’t put a lot of weight on stuff we can’t detect.

The sun accounts for 99.9+% of the solar system mass if I recall correctly

Close it’s ~99.85% excluding the ort cloud. However there’s a major bias towards smaller stars because they last longer though conversely they are harder to detect.

> I suspect in any solar system, the mass of the non-stars are a rounding error compared to the whole system's mass.

A brown dwarf orbiting a red dwarf would beg to differ.

Is the brown dwarf not considered a star? I don't know.

“A brown dwarf is an object which is made of the same stuff as stars, but does not have enough mass for hydrogen fusion (combining hydrogen atoms into helium atoms). Hydrogen fusion is what makes stars glow. Brown dwarfs are not massive enough to do this, so they are not stars. On the other hand, they are not regular giant planets, because they do glow.”

https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_dwarf

While very young they generate heat from both deuterium fusion but that only lasts millions to tens of millions of years. Energy from radioactive decay and their slow contraction lasts for much longer.

The nebulous space the Brown dwarf occupies in terms of classification is fascinating to say the least. I'm a passing not even hobbyist on the subject but that they glow but not like that is really interesting.

When I think of the brown dwarf I am also reminded of the hypothesized black dwarf. This would be the stage after white dwarf. It's hypothesized because it takes longer for the white dwarf bodies to cool than exists presently in the history of the universe. It's only a handful of sentences and will largely repeat the previous paragraph but there's the wiki page for black dwarf.

https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_dwarf

Very interesting stuff all around. Space is so fucking cool, y'all.

Which are both "low mass" compared to other stars out there

It might even be possible to have this combination weigh less than our sun

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