A bright triangle highlights the southern sky tonight: the Moon, the star Antares, and the planet Saturn. As night falls, Antares stands to the lower right of the Moon, with brighter Saturn about the same distance to the lower left of the Moon.

Antares is one of the most impressive stars in the galaxy. For that and other reasons, it’s unlikely that it has any planets of its own.

One of those reasons is the star’s age — only about 12 million years. Most models say that it takes almost that long to make planets.

And when Antares was born, it probably was much hotter than it is today. It would have produced an extraordinary amount of radiation, especially at ultraviolet wavelengths. That energy would have vaporized most of the planet-building materials close to Antares and blown them out into interstellar space.

Even if planets did form, they probably would have been incinerated in the last million years or so. That’s because Antares has puffed up to gigantic proportions — almost a thousand times the diameter of the Sun. So anything that formed close in would have been engulfed by the growing star, and anything farther out would have been vaporized as the surface of Antares grew closer.

And if, by some miracle, planets formed and survived, they’re doomed anyway. Sometime in the next hundred thousand years or so, Antares will explode as a supernova — an event that’s bad news for nearby planets.

More about the Moon and Saturn tomorrow.

Script by Damond Benningfield