Quote:
Originally Posted by speach
I suppose it's possible the stars would have to ....
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I think you're over-thinking things a bit.
Consider a multiple star / planetary system which is analogous to our solar system - except instead of Jupiter, we have a second star, perhaps a few dozen times the mass of Jupiter, but significantly less than the mass of the primary star. Most of the planets orbit around the primary star, with low-eccentricity orbits both inside and outside the orbit of the Jupiter-star. Just as in our solar system, the presence of such a large secondary object has ramifications for the orbital dynamics of the other planets, but things can still stabilise with resonances between the orbits of the Jupiter-star and the nearest planets to it.
One of the smallest known stars is OGLE-TR-122b, a red dwarf star that’s part of a binary stellar system. Its radius has been measured as 0.12 solar radii, or 167,000 km, which is only 20% larger than Jupiter (but with 100 times the mass of Jupiter). The primary is a Sun-like star, but the two stars are closely separated, with an orbital period of 7.3 days. Push OGLE-TR-122b out to 5 AU, and you have the makings of the sort of system I'm thinking of.
A low luminosity star at the distance of Jupiter would certainly change our night-time sky, but it wouldn't necessarily have a great impact on our orbit or climate. (And if you struggle to imagine this system as being stable, just put the Jupiter-star somewhere out past Neptune.) There is no reason why you couldn't have an Earth-like planet at a distance of 1 AU from the primary star - smack bang in the middle of the "Goldilocks Zone".
Now imagine that some of the "moons" of the Jupiter-star are much more massive than Jupiter's actual moons, some being comparable to Earth, so they can be thought of as being "Planets" in their own right. They are much closer than 1 AU to the Jupiter-star, but because it is a red dwarf, it is far less luminous than the primary star, and indeed, some of the Earth-sized moons are in its "Goldilocks Zone".
It's not too hard to imagine a system of this type being "stable" for hundreds of millions or billions of years. It's a fascinating thought - a solar system with two stars, and two independent "Goldilocks Zones"!