Can a star turn into a planet?
Daniel Moore
Published Jan 23, 2026
Yes, a star can turn into a planet, but this transformation only happens for a very particular type of star known as a brown dwarf. Some scientists do not consider brown dwarfs to be true stars because they do not have enough mass to ignite the nuclear fusion of ordinary hydrogen.
What can a star turn into?
When a star like the Sun has burned all of its hydrogen fuel, it expands to become a red giant. This may be millions of kilometres across - big enough to swallow the planets Mercury and Venus. After puffing off its outer layers, the star collapses to form a very dense white dwarf.
Can Jupiter turn into a star?
Jupiter, while more massive than any other planet in our solar system, is still far too underweight to fuse hydrogen into helium. The planet would need to weigh 13 times its current mass to become a brown dwarf, and about 83 to 85 times its mass to become a low-mass star.
Can Saturn become a star?
Well, first Saturn would have to be massive enough to become a star in the first place, which would mean it would have to be at least 8% the mass of the Sun. In that case, the barycenter of the Sun-Saturn system would be around .
Can a planet have 2 suns?
Can a planet really have two suns? While many things about Star Wars are purely fictional, it turns out that planets orbiting two or more stars is not one of them. In 2011, NASA embarked on the Kepler mission, exploring the Milky Way galaxy to find other habitable planets.
36 related questions foundIs Jupiter a failed star?
"Jupiter is called a failed star because it is made of the same elements (hydrogen and helium) as is the Sun, but it is not massive enough to have the internal pressure and temperature necessary to cause hydrogen to fuse to helium, the energy source that powers the sun and most other stars.
Can a star become a black hole?
Most black holes form from the remnants of a large star that dies in a supernova explosion. (Smaller stars become dense neutron stars, which are not massive enough to trap light.)
Can a star become a planet when it dies?
Yes, it is possible for stars to turn into planets. But this happens for only a specific category of stars- called as brown dwarfs.
Can a star explode?
A supernova is what happens when a star has reached the end of its life and explodes in a brilliant burst of light. Supernovae can briefly outshine entire galaxies and radiate more energy than our sun will in its entire lifetime. They're also the primary source of heavy elements in the universe.
Can the sun burn out?
But in about 5 billion years, the sun will run out of hydrogen. Our star is currently in the most stable phase of its life cycle and has been since the formation of our solar system, about 4.5 billion years ago.
Is Pluto a dead planet?
Pluto is now classified as a dwarf planet because, while it is large enough to have become spherical, it is not big enough to exert its orbital dominance and clear the neighborhood surrounding its orbit.
Can a wormhole exist?
In the early days of research on black holes, before they even had that name, physicists did not yet know if these bizarre objects existed in the real world.
Will our Sun go supernova?
The Sun as a red giant will then... go supernova? Actually, no—it doesn't have enough mass to explode. Instead, it will lose its outer layers and condense into a white dwarf star about the same size as our planet is now.
Will the Sun burn out or explode?
Will it burn out? The Sun won't explode. Some stars do explode at the end of their lives, an explosion that outshines all the other stars in their galaxy added together - something we call a “supernova”. That spectacular fate only happens for the most massive stars, however.
Can the planets collide?
Although orbital dynamics make it highly unlikely that two gas giants would collide, there's a small chance that such an impact could happen during the formation of a planetary system. The result of a collision mainly depends on the speed and angle of impact.
Can a planet become a black hole?
If, somehow, the electromagnetic and quantum forces holding the Earth up against gravitational collapse were turned off, Earth would quickly become a black hole.
What planet is Uranus?
Uranus is the seventh planet from the Sun, and has the third-largest diameter in our solar system. It was the first planet found with the aid of a telescope, Uranus was discovered in 1781 by astronomer William Herschel, although he originally thought it was either a comet or a star.
Will a black hole hit Earth?
It's unlikely, however, that any star ever came close enough to knock the other large bodies in our Solar System off course. The closest we can expect another star to have come, over our entire planet's existence, is about ~500 A.U. away, or about ten times the distance from the Sun to Pluto.
What would happen if the Sun died?
A: It's hard to say. After the Sun exhausts the hydrogen in its core, it will balloon into a red giant, consuming Venus and Mercury. Earth will become a scorched, lifeless rock — stripped of its atmosphere, its oceans boiled off. Astronomers aren't sure exactly how close the Sun's outer atmosphere will come to Earth.
What if the Sun turned into a black hole?
Our Sun is too small a star to end its life as a black hole. But what would happen if the Sun were suddenly replaced with a black hole of the same mass? Contrary to popular belief, the Solar System would not be sucked in: a solar-mass black hole would exert no more gravitational pull than our Sun.
Can humans survive a wormhole?
Humans could survive a trip through a wormhole, but there's a catch. There are drawbacks to this method — namely, such wormholes would be only microscopic, which means even the most hardcore exercise routine wouldn't make humans thin enough for the trip.
Is time traveling possible?
We can't use a time machine to travel hundreds of years into the past or future. That kind of time travel only happens in books and movies. But the math of time travel does affect the things we use every day. For example, we use GPS satellites to help us figure out how to get to new places.
Can you travel back in time?
Time travel to the past is theoretically possible in certain general relativity spacetime geometries that permit traveling faster than the speed of light, such as cosmic strings, traversable wormholes, and Alcubierre drives.
Is it possible for a planet to crash into Earth?
A new study finds reduced odds for collisions with Mercury, Venus, or Mars. One day, Mercury could slam into Earth, obliterating all life on our planet. That's a doomsday scenario scientists have said is a small but real possibility.