Planets, moons, comets and asteroids surround our Sun, like a merry round dance around a fire. No matter how much we love our native luminary, it must be admitted that this is just a medium-sized star.

Raise your head and see in the sky thousands of other equally great and bright suns, only very, very far from us. They are so far away that they look like little flickering dots. Beyond these stars are billions of others that can only be discerned through a telescope. There are hundreds of billions of stars in our Galaxy.

Galaxies

In addition, our galaxy is not alone. There are at least 100 billion galaxies like ours in the universe, each of which consists of millions of suns. Truly, the Universe is a gigantic structure. If there are so many stars, then is our Sun so unique that it alone has a planetary system. Scientists think this is just unbelievable. Moreover, they believe that in the Universe many, if not most, stars have planetary systems.

Planet search

Trying to find a medium-sized planet near the star closest to us is the same as trying to find a speck of dust that dangles in the air near a 1000-watt lamp at a distance of three kilometers.

According to some scientists in the Universe, at least 10 billion trillion planets.The problem is to find them, but it’s not so easy. Why? The fact is that, compared with the stars of the planet, they are very small and dark, because they themselves do not glow, they only reflect the light of their sun.

Unfortunately, the planets around other stars are too far away and perhaps too dim to be detected with Earth's telescopes. A medium-sized planet orbiting the nearest star to us will simply be lost in the brilliance of its luminary. Why? And here is why. Imagine that you are in a clean field at night looking at a thousand-watt lamp, which is located at a distance of three kilometers from you. You can see the lamp quite clearly.

But can you see a speck of dust that dangles in the air near this lamp? The answer is clear without comment. A planet near an “alien” star is also difficult to detect. Scientists have to find other ways to find planets. One of them is to investigate the gravitational effect that the desired planet exerts on its luminary. Gravity is universal. Any body attracts another body.

Interesting fact: stars attract planets; therefore, they revolve around stars.

The attraction of stars by planets

But the planets, in turn, attract stars, although much weaker. In addition, stars rotate around their axis, move in space along their trajectories, and even drag along carts of their planets. Scientists carefully evaluate deviations in the motion of stars according to their trajectories in outer space.These deviations can be caused by the force of gravity of the orbiting planets.

Interesting fact: scientists believe that in space there are 10 billion trillions of planets revolving around their bodies - the Suns.

In 1991, British astronomers reported that they discovered an object the size of a planet orbiting a star - a pulsar. A pulsar is a small, very dense star that rotates rapidly around its axis. During rotation, the pulsar emits an intermittent beam of radio waves. Scientists have suggested that something revolves around the star because its radio signal fluctuated, that is, it oscillated, as if the pulsar itself oscillated. American astronomers discovered similar vibrations of another pulsar. Around him, perhaps, two or three invisible planets revolve.

But in January 1992, the British came up with an unexpected message that they had made a mistake. Researchers did not take into account the rotation of the Earth around the Sun. And it affects the readings of instruments placed on Earth. This error led to a misinterpretation of the result in the sense that the pulsar oscillates. However, American colleagues announced that no such errors were made in their study. Their work and research by other astronomers give us confidence that we are almost certainly not alone in the universe.