Is the Sun the only star in this solar system?

Question

What are the other stars we see in the sky, if the Sun (which I know is a star) is the only one in our solar system.

Someone please explain to me as simply as you can. (My husband has no patience to explain)

I never question my assumption that there are other stars in our solar system, and I was never taught any differently. Until, my husband brought it up today, after I informed him that Pluto was no longer a planet but a star (which is incorrect, it is a dwarf planet). He then said that can't be cause there is only one star in our solar system, and that is where the war started....

war meaning and argument between us two

Explain the milky way to me. Isn't it a part of this solar system? Isn't it a body of stars?

Answer 1

yes, it is.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_System
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milky_Way

the stars you see at night are outside the solar system. they are other stars in the galaxy. the name of the galaxy in which we live is the milky way. there are about 200 billion stars in the galaxy. the sun is only one of these stars. the center of the galaxy is about 26 thousand light-years from the sun, and the sun orbits it once every 225 million to 250 million years. the sun is about 8.31 light-minutes from earth, but the nearest star to the sun (proxima centauri) is about 4.22 light-years from the sun so you can see that the sun is much closer to earth than proxima centauri is.

read the two links above and the two below.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxima_Centauri

Answer 2

YES! There is only one Sun in our solar system! Otherwise you'd be seeing two suns in the sky. There are situations where there are two suns gravitationally bound to each other; these are called binary systems (meaning: two suns in one gravitational system).

Ours is one small solar system within a larger grouping called The Milky Way Galaxy. It is a large disk galaxy. We see it on edge; it's the bright band of stars across the sky when you're out in the country at night. Each of those stars is a sun in other solar systems that are far, far away. There are also many other galaxies, they're generally just a smudge of light, a whole bunch of suns at an incredible distance, so individual stars (suns) cannot be distinguished without high powered telescopes.

After much discussion, Pluto has been defined as "Not a Planet". A series of conditions were established that define a planet. Pluto was excluded because it has an eccentric orbit that is out of sync with the other planets of our solar system. Some scientists feel that Pluto was formed elsewhere and has been captured by our sun's gravitational force, but perhaps temporarily because of it's extraordinary distance from the sun and its eccentric orbit. However it is an object revolving around our sun, so it and a number of other objects were given a new classification of "minor planets". Due to our (humanity's) increasing ability to see longer distances and resolve fuzzy images, we are discovering more and more anomalies both in our solar system and beyond. And more and more planets are being discovered around other suns.

I hope this helps with your discussions.

Answer 3

There is only one star in our solar system, the Sun. The stars we see at night are a lot like our Sun, in fact many are bigger and brighter than our Sun. But they are really far away. If you were to build a scale model of our solar system, where the Sun and Pluto are separated by a few city blocks, then the nearest star would be roughly 3000 miles away!

The planets and asteroids and comets in our solar system all orbit our Sun, because the Sun is by far the most massive object in our solar system. Other stars are not part of our solar system because they do not orbit our Sun. In fact, our Sun and all the other stars we can see orbit around the center of our Galaxy - we're about half-way between the center and the edge of our galaxy.

By the way, not knowing that the stars are not part of our solar system, that's a very common misconception. I teach college astronomy, and many of my students think the same thing at the start of the semester.

Hope this helps!

Answer 4

Yes, the Sun is the only star within our Solar System. Our entire "known" Solar System is only about 80 astronomical units (AU). The "nearest" star to our Solar System is Alpha Centauri, which is 1.33 parsecs or 4.3 light years distant and shows a parallax of about 0.75" (arcsecs). One light year is 63,240 AU's or 5.88 trillion miles. If there was another star within our Solar System, then there would also be another "Sun" in our day-time skies, or the possibility of never having "night" if the star was outside the Earth's orbit around the Sun which is the "center" of our Solar System.

Answer 5

Yes. The only solar systems with more than one star would be binary systems, and you could tell. Think Tatooine in Star Wars. The twin suns show us that that system has a binary star as its system's star. But these are rare. Most solar systems just have one star, and many planets....

Answer 6

Solar means sun. The solar system describes the 8 planets that move around our sun.

The sun is a star. A star is simply a large plasmic (kinda like gas, but only found in stars) fireball. Stars form everywhere in the universe. A galaxy can have 100's of trillions of stars.

Every star has a different luminousity (glow). Bigger stars are more luminous.

Every star has a different brightness based on its distance from us. Close stars appear brighter.

When we see other stars, they appear different. We are seeing them based on their size and our distance. The other stars we see are incredibly far away. We measure their distance in light years (how far light travels in a year).

Light travels about 300,000 kilometers per second. That means in one year light goes 9,460,800,000,000 kilometers. Other stars may be 100's, 1000's, or millions of light years away.

The light that we see from those stars then has been traveling for 100's, or 1000's or millions of years. In essence, we see stars as they existed many years ago.

The closest star we see is in the Andromeda cluster and about 4 million light years away.

Is that simple?

Answer 7

Yes, the sun is the only star in the OUR solar system. There are other stars in out galaxy (Milky Way) but not all of them necessarily are part of their own solar systems.

By "Solar System" it is meant that there is a system of sattellites (planets, asteroids, comets, etc.) which orbit a star ("Sol" being the name of our sun, hence "Solar").

Other stars may stand alone...with nothing orbiting them. Others my have their own system of planets, etc. Solar systems plus other singular stars and other celestial bodies collectively form our galaxy.

Answer 8

By definition, our "Sun" is the only star in our solar system. All other stars make up their unique and individual solar systems. A solar system is made up of one star and all the other objects in it's area. There is a lot of room between them. The nearest solar system to ours is several light years away.

Answer 9

Guide To Solar Power - http://SolarPower.siopu.com/?dVo

Answer 10

Some astronomers have theorized that our sun (officially called "Sol") is part of a weak binary system, with the other member being a brown dwarf nicknamed "Sol-B." (A brown dwarf is a "star" that is too small for sustained nuclear fusion reactions), They believe it lies in the Oort Cloud, and base their theory on the behavior of some comets.
Still, "Sol" is the only confirmed star within our solar system