What if told you when you look up at the night sky most of those points of light are actually
more than one star.
Don’t believe me?
“I find your lack of faith disturbing.”
Hey there you scruffy looking Nerfherders, Julia here for DNews
As we ramp up for the new Star Wars film, oh it better be good.
We were wondering...Is a Tatooine Sunset a work of fiction?
Well science says such a planet might be out there, in a galaxy far, far away.
Scientists know that double sun systems are pretty common.
Binary star systems orbit around a common center of mass.
Usually one is bigger than other and called the “primary.”
While most look like a single point of light to us here on Earth, some you can tell are
binary just by looking through a telescope.
Appropriately these are called visual binaries.
Some are too far away or too close together to really tell apart.
To detect these, researchers use Spectroscopy.
They look for Doppler shifts, or the way their wavelengths of light change when they revolve
around each other.
You can guess what researchers call these, yeah, spectroscopic binaries.
Some binaries align with Earth in a way where one star eclipses the other.
So naturally scientists call these Eclipsing binaries.
Binaries form kind of like twins.
Some form like identical twins, where the same body forms then splits into two.
The young star spins so fast as it collapses, the ball of burn gas elongates and cleaves
into two, like a cell dividing.
But one study published in Astrophysical Journal found evidence that binaries form more like
fraternal twins.
They form separately but from the same mass of gas and dust.
The study used the Very Large Array to look at young stars just starting to form.
A disc of gas and dust surrounds these baby stars, and when the researchers looked closer
they saw another smaller clump starting to form.
The disc fragmented and developed another baby star.
While this sounds kind of complicated, turns out it’s pretty common.
Some estimates suggest nearly half of the stars we see are actually multiple star systems.
While multiple star systems form pretty easily, scientists thought it would be pretty difficult
for Earth-like planets to form around them.
Previously scientists thought Tatooine was just a work of fiction.
Most celestial bodies found orbiting binary star systems were uninhabitable big gassy
giants.
It’s tricky for more rocky planets to form around a star.
Too close and they get pulled in.
Too far and they don’t form at all.
Around a single star, planets form in concentric rings, so they rarely cross each other’s
path.
If they do, eh, they come together slowly and could form a single planet without much
damage.
Around a binary star system however, it’s another story.
Planets could hit each other at higher speeds, smashing them to bits before they ever can
coalesce.
But researchers from the University of Utah think that if planets find an oval orbit,
they’ll “nest’ around each other and won’t crash into destruction.
They say that it could be “ just as easy to make an Earthlike planet around a binary
star as it is around a single star like our sun.”
And researchers from the Ohio State University found a terrestrial planet orbiting in a binary
star system!
(OGLE-2013-BLG-0341LBb).
This planet is about 3,000 light years away.
It’s cold and dark, so probably not inhabited.
But the cool thing about this planet, it’s orbit is in kind of an S shape.
It basically ignores one of the stars and just orbits around one.
And its discovery could provide evidence that similar planets, maybe even one like Tatooine,
exist,…
Speaking of space and wars in Space.
Is there a Dark Side of the Moon?
Is there sound in space?
Check out more of these tall space tales in this great video from Life Noggin.