>>that were able to escape the influence of that star. >What's the mechanism here? Is it something with greater mass that pulled it into an escape? I'm a laym

>>that were able to escape the influence of that star. >What's the mechanism here? Is it something with greater mass that pulled it into an escape? I'm a layman. Take what I say with skepticism, but I think in this case the parent poster was referring to any mechanism that ends up with a planet getting out of the orbit of the star. One such potential mechanism is gravitational slingshotting. Let's imagine you have a planet orbiting a star. A satellite flies in towards the planet. As the spacecraft passes by the planet, it gets some of the momentum of the planet as the planet is moving around the star. The planet loses that momentum. This increases the satellite's velocity in relation to the sun. The satellite can reach escape velocity and escape the influence of the star. Edit: alternatively to reading my explanation, you could read Wikipedia's: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_assist#Explanation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_assist#Explanation There's an amazing gif of Voyager 2's slingshots. Pay attention to the velocity as it passes planets: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_assist#/media/File:Animation_of_Voyager_2_trajectory.gif https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_assist#/media/File:Ani... I don't see why a similar thing couldn't happen to planets.