Our Sun has a rather lonely existence in the Milky Way galaxy. It sits on its own, four light years away from the nearest star, with only its planetary system for the company. But it wasn’t always like this. We almost exclusively observe young stars in groups, so-called stellar nurseries, where they brush shoulders with stellar siblings.
These stellar nurseries are densely populated places, where hundreds of thousands of stars often reside in the same volume of space that the Sun inhabits on its own. Violent interactions, in which stars exchange energy, occur frequently, but not for long. After a few million years, the groups of stars dissipate, populating the Milky Way with more stars.
Our new paper, published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, shows how massive stars in such stellar nurseries can steal planets away from each other – and what the signs of such theft are.
