How Many Red Dwarves Can Make One Stable P-Orbit?

Question

Red dwarves are the most common stars in our galaxy, if not the whole universe. They are small--the largest don't exceed one-half of a solar mass--but scientists still believe in their potential for habitability due simply to their lifespan. We don't exactly know how long a red dwarf can live. Some say hundreds of billions of years. Some even say trillions. But the point stands that they can support life for far longer than our sun can.

But this raises its own problems. Red dwarves are so dim that for any planets orbiting them to sustain life, they have to do so at a very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very close distance--close enough for one side to be eternal day and another to be eternal night. (Not at all Earthlike, if you ask me.)

I've been advised, again and again, that pitting main-sequence stars in a trinary P-style orbit just isn't feasible. Such an arrangement won't allow for a stable orbit. But the smaller red dwarves don't seem to have that problem. So my question is this--how many red dwarves can join together to make a stable P-type orbit as well as free any nearby planets into spinning in day-night cycles?

Answer 1

If you want a stable system with red dwarfs you need to take a different approach:

Put a large black hole in the center, a ring of stars around it. If the black hole is big enough your stars will be stable. The planet(s) orbit the black hole, not the dwarfs.

Do it right and you can have a habitable world, but beware of the radiation coming off the jets from the black hole--that close to the stars there certainly will be jets.

Answer 2

This is a frame challenge.

You don't need a P-type orbit around a complex bunch of red dwarves to get a habitably-warm planet with day/night cycles.

An S-type orbit in a binary star system will do. The planet orbits one red dwarf, which provides most of the planet's total heat budget, and to which it is tidally locked, thus bathing one hemisphere in eternal daylight. As it completes its synchronous rotation about its primary star, however, the planet will alternately turn its other hemisphere towards and away from the second star. The light from that star will provide the day-night cycles for the antistellar hemisphere of the planet.