Binary And Multiple Stars!

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If you’re a Star Wars fan, one of the most beautiful moments in the whole movie series was the sunset right outside of the Skywalker residence in Tatooine. Having a curious mind like we do, surely you have thought, “Is this scenario possible? Is it possible to stand on a planet where I would stare at a sunset with twin stars?”

Hold on to your seats as we solve this question in today’s episode!
The Skywalkers’ estate is located on a planet named Tatooine, which, according to the Star Wars fandom wiki, belongs to the Tatoo stellar system. This is very unique due to the characteristics of its center: it revolves around what we call a binary star.
Back before, astronomers thought that star systems were mostly singular. We couldn’t blame them since our very own Solar System is a single star system, so naturally, one would think “maybe all the other stars are the same?” Thankfully, William Herschel found out otherwise.
So how do they actually form?
Well, if you recall, our Sun’s birth involved a swirling cloud of dust and gas, with an extremely massive, and and extremely energetic center, which sooner or later settled down to form the Solar System.
Binaries have the same story. They, too, have started from a cloud of dust or a Nebula. However, instead of settling to just one star, the particles coalesce to two or more. That’s about it. Scientists didn’t really find anything particular yet to what conditions would give birth to specifically just binaries.
Let’s look into the types of binary stars, shall we?
The first type is the optical double stars. These are stars that cannot be really categorically described to be binary, since in reality, they are not. It’s just that if we look at them hard enough, the degree of separation between the two is really difficult to distinguish, leading to the misjudgement of taking them to be binary stars.
Earlier, we have stated that binary stars move in a common barycenter. So, if an observed star is actually a binary, then, observing how two stars move with respect to one another must give the information we need to verify. A simple if-then solution but quite ingenious, isn’t it?
Okay, how about we move to the category of actual binary stars?
To have the first example, we don’t have to go so far because the closest star to earth (after Sun, of course), Alpha Centauri , is actually a visual binary star composed of two smaller stars called Alpha Centauri a and b.
General relativity explains that since light is a wave, a moving light source is also bound to the Doppler effect. Specifically speaking, in the case of stellar objects, a star moving towards the Earth tends to have a frequency moving towards the blue spectrum, while a star moving in the opposite manner will have a frequency moving towards the red side. This is more commonly known as a redshift, and binary stars determined using this way are called spectroscopic binaries.The stars Sirius and Cygnus X-1 belong to this category.
There are also stars which redshift are difficult to observe or are completely unobservable. However, if we use spectroscopy, we are bound to see a combination of spectral change depending on the motion of the stars in the binary. If one star is moving away, we’re bound to observe the spectral emission to shift closer to red, and if the other is moving towards us, it shifts towards blue. These binaries are called Spectrum Binaries. Human ingenuity is really awesome isn’t it?
Are you getting closer to guessing what the “almost” binary star is? We surely hope so.
The next category is a bit controversial. It covers what happens to binary stars once they get too close that they essentially develop a parasitic relationship. These stars are called contact binaries due to the fact that they are so close to one another that they are practically “in contact”, as the name goes, all the time.
What happens to the mass being lost?
Back in the 1980’s scientists inferred the possibility of a second star that may have formed in the same protoplanetary disc in our Solar System that they aptly named “Nemesis”. They speculated that this might be either a brown dwarf, dim red dwarf or even a white dwarf. Some geologists even dared to hypothesize that this could have caused several mass extinctions to our planet Earth.

Video Chapters:
00:00 Introduction
00:34 Bimary Stars Explained
02:32 Historical Insights
05:13 Visual and Spectroscopic Binary Stars
08:29 Eclipsing and Contact Binary Stars
12:06 The Sun as a Potential Binary Star

#insanecuriosity #star #astronomy

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