Daniel and Jorge Explain the UniverseDaniel and Jorge talk about binary star systems, trinary star systems and totally bonkers star systems with even more stars!
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Hey or hey, I have a question about stars.
And you're asking me. Is it about cartoon stars?
Close? Actually, it's about Hollywood stars, all right?
Yeah, I live next to Hollywood, so I might be able to answer it. What's the question, all right?
How many stars can you have in a single family.
Like media stars. Let's see, there's the two athletic brothers. I think there are three Hemsworth brothers, and there are four Baldwin brothers.
What about the Jackson five?
That just might be the peak of stardom in a family.
Any denser with stars and it might collapse into.
What a Paparassi black hole?
That sounds dense and dangerous.
I am Horeham and cartoonist and the creator of PhD comics.
Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I was really disappointed the first time I saw the Walk of Stars in Hollywood.
Really why it wasn't shiny enough or those chewing gum and cigarettes all over the place.
Yeah, it wasn't nearly as glamorous as I expected. And also I didn't recognize the names of anybody I saw, so I learn who are all these people?
You mean, you're a physicists and you didn't know who's making the movies.
Or nineteen forties radio stars.
Yeah, it's kind of weird to have your star because it just makes people walk all over it all the time.
Put out their cigarette on your star, and the Walk of.
Fame take if they gave you a Nobel Prize and then they put the metal on the floor in a busy intersection exactly.
They don't pave the streets with busts and Nobel Prize.
Winners, right, but maybe they should.
Maybe they should. They need some more humility, for sure.
Would you take a Hollywood star if they offered you one?
For what?
Maybe? For our podcast? The sky's the limit for this podcast.
I would do anything for this podcast, even except a Hollywood Walk of Fame star.
But welcome to that podcast. Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of iHeartRadio in which.
The universe is the star and it's full of stars and we don't understand those stars, but we'd like to, and so we apply our curiosity and we surf on the waves of your curiosity to ask the biggest, deepest questions about the universe, not just about stars, but about where they come from and where they end up, how they all work, and what it all means. We don't shy away from anything in this podcast. We ask all of it, and we break it all down to you in a way we hope makes sense and maybe even makes you laugh.
Yeah, because it is a pretty famous universe. Although Daniel, I thought we were the stars of the podcast. We are we the supporting actors or the extras or are we like the catering service.
Yes, we are the service staff, the stars of the podcast. Are you listeners?
Oh? Good? Save there. Yeah. We like to talk about the amazing universe out there and all of the famous stuff in it, especially the stars, because I feel like the stars are the stars of the universe.
I'm just grateful that stars exist, that matter forms these incredible clumps that glow so brightly. Imagine if most of the universe was dark, it wasn't glowing, it'd be still much harder to figure out what was going on. So I'm grateful to these like lighthouses in the universe that tell us what's going on and illuminate it for us, Like literally, yeah.
That's what I mean. They're like the stars of the universe, Like you know, they're the main attraction. That's why people go to the universe. That's why they stream it, that's why they download bootleg versions of it.
That's right, And that's why people like summer more than winter, right, because the sun is the star.
Oh, we're closer to the star of our solar system.
Yeah, exactly. We feel closer to it and we literally feel its warmth. I mean, it's incredible that this star, which is a burning ball of plasma ninety three million miles away, you can still feel the heat of that with your bare hands. You know, Like, have you ever been near a bonfire that's so hot you can't stand near it? You take a few steps back and it just dissipates. Right, Well, now, imagine a bonfire is so hot you can still feel its heat ninety three million miles away. That's our star. It's just it's mind boggling.
Yeah, our star is pretty hot here. It's blowing up all the time.
It should get a star on the Walk of Fame. It's pretty famous. It's the biggest star out there.
We I like it, you know, I mean I can look at it directly. But Philip's pressence half of the time.
It's been in a lot of movies, right. It's IMDb page is amazing.
Has a long list of credits. Yes, every living human being and animal and plant and insects is credited to our son.
Exactly. It should least get acknowledgments in every paper. Scientists should be acknowledging it and thank you to the Sun for providing all the energy we use. I'm going to do that next time.
Seriously, you should get a Hollywood star on the Walk of Fame. But it is pretty unique in our solar system. It is basically the main thing in our solar system.
That's right, and our solar system, for the longest time, was the only way we had to learn about this basic unit of the universe, how solar systems and planetary systems work. So for a long time we thought this was it, that this was the way it happened, and we imagine that maybe every other solar system looked like this. But the more we look out in the universe, the more we discover that things out there are weird, or that we are weird, that we are unusual compared to what's out there in the universe. So you got to ask basic, simple questions about how the universe works, because you might be surprised by the answers.
Yeah, well, I think we're definitely weird. That's regardless of our son.
What we do you mean that you mean me, and you do you mean the whole human race? You mean podcast listeners.
I mean like the royal We like the royal family, especially us the kings of this podcast.
Do we have a duel king monarchy in this podcast or is one of.
Those three queens we're cokings. I think we're cokings. That's what we do in this podcast.
We coke up on the universe. We sniff up the deliciousness of the universe.
Oh, man, I was thinking coca cola. Oh you went a little darker. The universe is my drug, man, the universe. It does get you high. But anyways, it is a pretty special star. And I wonder, Daniel, when you mentioned like other stars in other parts of the universe. I wonder when in human history we realize that our sun was a star, just like those little pinpoints you see in the night sky. Like, was that a big revelation for people?
It was a big revelation, absolutely, And you know that kind of revelation is a few hundred years old. But there was this moment, like a few hundred years ago when Newton and others realized that there was probably one set of laws of physics, and those laws applied equally to like things here on Earth, and motion of things in the sky, including the Sun, and including all those stars, and so understanding that the Sun was a star suggested that all those other pinpricks in the sky were also probably solar systems that might have planets on them. And the rite that realization is just a few hundred years old. But what a mind blowing idea to realize, you know that we are one of billions and billions and billions. That really must shake the whole foundation of what you think it means to be human.
Makes it a little less unique, like less of a star of the universe, to think that, you know, there's bazillions of suns out there.
Yeah, but it immediately begs lots of other questions, like what are those stars? Like what are those solar systems? Like? Are there planets in life around those solar systems? While it suggests that there might be, Because we know that our sun is not rare or weird or interesting, that it's just one of billions, we don't actually know, and until recently we hadn't seen planets around any other star. Until like twenty thirty years ago, we'd never observed a planet around a star other than our own. It could have been that our solar system was the only one with planets, right, how weird would that have been.
Right, Yeah, although you have to assume that their movies are in a different language. So maybe you know there's like a local star. Maybe everyone's famous in the in Poland. Isn't that the same?
I'm world famous in Poland? Yeah, that's a classic mel Brooks too. Yeah, but we didn't know, like maybe planetary formation was really unusual, and most stars just form as stars, right, They gather up all the stuff and that's it. You just have stars, and having planets is weird and results of some strange fluctuation. Now, of course we know the opposite is true, that planets are totally normal, and that most solar systems have planets, that there are planets everywhere. There's billions and trillions of planets out there.
Right, And I think something interesting is that I think by now maybe most people know that all stars out there are suns. But I think most people assume that when you look at a star in the night sky, it's like one star, like one sun that you're looking at, like each pinpoint is one specific sun that's shining. But that's not necessarily true, right.
That's right, it's not necessarily true. It turns out that sometimes stars formed together, and then you can have more than one star in a solar system. And if they're really far away, like basically every other star is, it's not always easy to make them out by eye. So some things that you see in the sky might be binary or trinary or even crazier star systems.
Yeah, but they're so far away they look like one pinpoint right.
Yeah, unless you have a really powerful telescope or you use some cool techniques we're going to talk about today, it's pretty hard to tell if it's one star or several.
And so today on the podcast, we'll be asking the question how many stars can a solar system have? Now, Daniel, are these like stellar stars or are these like yelp review stars.
There's no limit on how many stars you can give on Yelp. I think you can be like.
I think five is the most. Can you give ten stars on Yelp?
Isn't there some premium subscription version we can give as many stars as you want? And if not Yelp, I totally suggest you offer that to people.
Yeah, let people be diffusive, prey.
Because I would give our solar system totally ten out of five stars.
Only ten, Daniel, Come on, I mean that's.
Double the maximum and being generous here, Like.
Are you looking at other solar systems thinking maybe they have better boba tea or pizza?
I don't need to have options. I can go to a restaurant and I can rate it just on its food. I don't need to compare it to the other restaurants in town. I can say five out of five would have that falafel again, and in the same way I can say ten out of five I would totally evolve here.
Again, seems very unscientific of you, Daniel. I would have expected something more systematic, you know, like, are you assuming you've tasted every pizza in the universe?
Sometimes my belly feels like I have, But no, I am not. It's purely subjective. I totally agree I have no scientific system for rating solar systems.
Well, I would give our solar system, I guess infinity stars because you know I'm here because of it, and that's worth an infinite amount of a value to me.
Well, I'm glad that you don't forget the little stars that helped you along the way.
Our star is a little underdog. But yeah, it's kind of an interesting question. How many stars can a solar system have, Like we know our solar system has one, and we know that there are binary star systems out there, but like how many can you fit into one place? Like ten, twenty one hundred?
And these are my favorite kinds of questions, the one that are very simple and just sort of like blow up basic assumptions you maybe never thought to ask about. Like people are now cool with wondering how many planets could there be in imagining solar systems with like twenty planets or just two planets or like really big weird planets or fluffy planets or something. People are like sort of stretch their mind that way. But I think a lot of people haven't really bent their minds in the other direction. I think most people think of a solar system as like a star with stuff around it, And so I think it's really good to like remind ourselves that the example we see, what we sort of defined our existence around, isn't necessarily representative. That we've got to keep our minds open to other kinds of stellar families.
Yeah, and made me think of Star Wars, you know, and that famous scene in that movie where Luke Skywalker is looking out into the horizon and he see there are two stars in the sky.
I know that's crazy and it would make for a crazy pattern of day and night. I don't know how you could be a farmer on a planet with.
Two sons and you'd have two shifts.
Maybe you'd have some crazy almanac. You're like, Okay, it's summer, now, it's double summer. Now, it's half summer. Now it's sort of winter. You know, like if the seasons would just be nuts.
Right right, Well, let's get into it, Daniel, how many stars can a solar system have? And so, as usual, we were wondering how many people out there had thought about this question or even knew that you could have more than one or two stars in a solar system. So Daniel went out there into the wild of the internet to ask people how many stars can a solar system have?
So thank you very much to everybody who participated. If you are out there and been listening to the podcast and never lent your voice to these questions, please write to us two questions at Danielandjorge dot com. No pressure, but I think you'll love it.
Here's what people had to say.
I hadn't really considered that, but I know that a large number of solar systems. Do you have at least two stars? There might be somewhere three, but I'm not actually sure the maximum.
So yeah, I think a solar system can have more than one star. I remember seeing something on the television about a binary star system, so I think it can have more than one star.
I think a solar system can have one or two stars. We have one star that is our sun, and then there are binary systems, which consist of two stars orbiting around each other, and I think it is possible for there to be like planetary objects orbiting them. You have binary stars and triple star systems. Whether there's any limit on to it, I doubt it. As long as it's protaentially locked.
I don't think there's a limit.
But at some point it will stop being a solar system become a galaxy.
Well, I know that there are binary systems, which would mean two stars. I don't see why there couldn't be three stars in a solar system. And I think I saw a science fiction program where they mentioned a seven star solar system, but that was science fiction, probably not based in fact. But I really don't know what the upper limit would be. Probably something between three and seven.
I'm not sure if a physical limit. A solar system can certainly have multiple stars. I know binary stars are very common. I'm not sure if there's anything to say that you couldn't have ten stars or sort of in some amazing orbit around each other. I suspect in a stellar nursery where they're all quite compact, we have a lot of stars in close proximity that have a gravitational impact on each other.
Well, a solar system can probably have a bunch of stars I know are obviously our solar system has one, and I know that many of the stars solar systems out there have two stars. And I'm sure you can have like a trinary system. I feel like I've seen a couple of movies with that. I don't know if there's a fundamental limit, but I know it gets a little harder to get all the equations to balance out if you have more and more stars. Things get a little chaotic when you have a bunch of things urbiting each other. So I'm going to go with maybe three might be sort of like the practical limit, but maybe there's some.
More, all right, A lot of guessing. Most people start to like one or two. I guess you don't hear about like a three or more than two star system, right, Like, I feel like binary star is a common phrase.
Yeah, people are being conservative here. They're not like, you know, reach out and imagining solar systems with like fifty stars in them and stuff like that. I think it just goes to show you that people think of solar systems as dominated by a star maybe two, and then planets around it.
Right. I gets it's hard to wrap your head around. It might just be like chaos, like who would win or who would be the dominant star? Why wouldn't they just crash into each other?
Yeah, you feel like a solar system has to have somebody in charge.
Well, it could be like a committee run solar system, you know, majority rules or you know, I'm sure they use the Roberts rule to make decisions about orbits and things like that.
So you're in favor of socialism when it comes to.
Organizing, favor solar socialism. Yes, the SSSS cosmic Social Society of Socialists Solar.
Systems and communist or cosmologists.
Ooh nice, nice, But then it gets all eaten up by a democratic stars matter.
Unfortunately, dark matter wild totally win the vote, actually because it totally without vote us, right, we do not want the macracy.
There you go, it's more autocratic, I think, astronomically autocratic.
Yeah, it's just like in some countries they have more animals than people, like Denmark has more pigs than people, and so if they give pigs the vote, the people will probably get voted out of office.
Well, let's not make any politician jokes here with pigs.
You just did you?
No? I didn't. But I like this person who said that they've seen a star system with seven stars in science fiction.
Yeah.
Yeah, so that means that authors out there have been creative in imagining the stellar systems. So again, kudos to science fiction.
Authors, right, or like Avengers movies. I feel like those Avengers movies have like, you know, twenty stars in them.
And did you give them all five stars?
On yelp? IMDb?
Daniel?
Are you reviewing movies on yelp? But anyways, let's get into Daniel. I guess most people seem to know about binary stars, and I'm sure that just means that it has two stars. So let's talk about first a binary star system. How common are they and how can they come to be, Like, how do you get a star system with two stars in them?
Yeah, most of them are binary star systems. But we'll talk later about solar systems with even more stars. But it's not rare at all. So it's a third of the stars in the Solar system are in a binary star system.
So like when I look at the night sky, a third of the stars that I'm looking at are actually two stars.
Yeah exactly.
Wow, So if I look out and I'm seeing double it's about a third, right, Like it's not my eyesight necessarily.
Yeah, or you know, stop having drinks or whatever, but yeah, exactly. There are lots and lots and lots of double star systems out there, something we really didn't imagine until recently. It turns out to be really pretty common.
So I guess maybe a question is how do they form? Like why didn't they just form as one star? How did it come to have two stars?
Right? Well, you have to imagine how solar systems form. Right, you have this big cloud of gas and dust, this initial building blocks of the solar system. What makes that collapse?
Right?
What makes that collapse into a star. Sometimes you get like a shock wave that comes through from like a supernova or something that triggers this collapse. But often you have really big that's too big for just one star to form, So we call these like stellar nurseries. You get like bunches and bunches of stars all forming at the same time. And so sometimes those stars form close enough that they start to tug on each other, and they pull on each other and then they become a binary star system. So like you could have formed a larger star right in the middle, but where the stars actually formed depends a little bit on like what happens to be a little bit denser, because remember this is a gravitational process, and so the dense spot pulls on other stuff and accumulates. It's a runaway process, and so you just happen to have like two spots that are a little denser, a little closer to each other. You can get stars forming close enough to form a binary star system.
I guess they each are sort of dominant in their little region, but it just so happens that the two regions are sort of close enough together that they form a system together.
Yeah, and you can imagine it's not that different from our Sun and Jupiter. If Jupiter was a little bit bigger. You know, it has like only one percent of the mass of the Solar system. If it had like a little bit more, you could call that thing a star. So why didn't Jupiter get more mass? Well, you know, if it'd been a little bit further away, or the dynamics of how things had been distributed had been different, you might have had a more balanced distribution between the Sun and Jupiter.
Interesting, like we could have had a binary system. Like if Jupiter had turned on or eaten more of that infinite pizza, we would have like a second star in our sky.
Yeah, So it's just an example of how out of basically a single cloud of stuff, you can have two focide, right, you can have two places where things start to accumulate and it doesn't always just collapse down to one. So that's a good example, and you know a little bit different. And yeah, we could have had a binary star system. We could have been tattooined basically.
Right, although it wouldn't They wouldn't look that big, right, Like the Sun would look really big in our sky, but Jupiter would just look like a pinpoint, wouldn't it.
Well, Jupiter is much further away than the Sun, and so it does look a lot less bright for that reason. But it depends, you know, on how things work. If Jupiter had been bigger, it probably would have ended up a different spot in the Solar system. We had this whole fun podcast episode about how Jupiter ended up where it is, and it sort of drifted towards the center of the Solar system and then Saturn wrangled it and pulled it back out. But if Jupiter had been bigger, it might have just drifted towards the inner part of the Solar system and formed a very tight binary spiral with our Sun, or they might have even merged.
Well, I guess the question for me is that if you have these two big things in a solar system, why don't they just crash into each other? I think that's one question, And the other question is what is it like to have two stars in your solar system? So let's get into that, and maybe e more star systems put more stars in them than two. But first let's take a quick break.
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All right, we're talking about two star systems, systems with multiple stars in them, and we started with two Daniel, what is it like to have a two stars in your system? Like, wouldn't the two stars just crash into each other or suck each other up?
Well, things can be in stable orbits. Right, It's like asking the question why doesn't the Earth get sucked into the Sun For the same reason, it has the right velocity and the right direction to be in a stable orbit. As two objects approach each other, it's possible for them to crash into each other and you know, suck each other up. It's also possible for them to be in a stable orbit.
So if you had two stars in a system, you'd have the two stars certain each other forever.
Kind of right, Yeah, they could be stably circling their common center of mass. And so instead of thinking about it like as a solar system with a star of the center and everything moving around it, think about it like two stars of the center orbiting some point in between them, and then probably there are other things in the solar system and they're orbiting that also that common center of mass, the point between the two stars.
Like, if you're a planet, you would orbit the center like the middle point between them.
Yeah, if you're a planet, it doesn't matter to you if you have two stars orbiting each other, or if you replace those two stars with a big star right at the center of mass. It looks the same to you from a Newtonian dynamics and so yeah, you could just orbit the center of mass of those two stars.
So if you were far enough away from these two stars, like life wouldn't be that different from what we have now, right, Like, it's not like we would, you know, sometimes see one star to the right and another one to the left, or sometimes you know, we would only see one star, like usually you would probably only see you would see the two stars at the same time in the sky.
That's right, Probably the two stars would be closest to each other at the center of the system, and then you'd be orbiting both of them. And so like having a crazy system like we were talking about before, where you like pass between the stars is less likely, And if you had a system like that, it wouldn't be very stable, like that's a three body system. Those systems are very very chaotic, and so a system like that would likely just eject or lose its planets. And so it's be very unlikely to have a planet in a system where like a planet is passing between the two stars most likely to be doing an orbit around the two star system.
I see, So instead of seeing like one bright circle in the sky, you would just see two of them.
Yeah, but they mostly be moving together.
Right, But they might change in size relatively to each other, Right, Like as I'm going around, sometimes I'm closer to one and sometimes I'm closer to the other one. So maybe the weather would be really weird, right.
Yeah, And they can eclipse each other, right, One can pass in front of the other, So you could have a sun's sun eclipse, right, because they could be different brightnesses and different colors. You could have like a red star and a yellow star, and so like the color in the sky could change as they pass in front of each other.
That'd be pretty cool. Would they change, like with the sky change color? Probably right, Like the light would get mixed up.
Yeah, it'd be awesome for artists, right. And that golden hour the photographers like to use at the beach right to be like lots of different kinds of colored hours.
Cool. All right, So then, and these systems are stable.
You say these systems are stable. A two body system can be stable. A three body system is very complicated, and we're gonna have a whole podcast episode about that very soon. The three body problem is famously difficult to solve. But a two star system can be stable, and then you can have a planet orbiting around that two star system. That's the key to stability is to really take a three body system and make it into effectively two bodies by putting two of them close to each other, so you can like sort of treat them as one.
Right, And you're saying those are more stable, which means that they're you know, more likely like the ones that are chaotic probably crash into each other or something else happened.
Yeah, exactly, And there may have been a lot of trinary star systems formed where we have three stars all formed together. But that's a very unstable situation. And so that's why we have a lot more binary star systems than triinary star systems, because probably when there were three, two of them got together and ejected the.
Third, kind of like human relationships a little bit.
Kind of like the Hemsworth brothers.
You know, I don't think they've ejected any of it. Well, I guess the third one is not as famous.
Yeah, exactly.
But you kind of blew my mind when you said about a third of stars out there are binary systems. And I guess maybe a question is like, how do we know, Like in a nice sky, they just look like pinpoints, how do we know that there are two in each of those pinpoints?
Yeah, so we can study these things and we can tell sometimes when they're binary star systems. There's two ways to do it. One is just visually, like you get a really powerful telescope, you can actually see that a star is not spherical in your telescope. You don't even have to be able to see like the gap between them. You can just tell that it looks more like a peanut where it's all long, or that its shape seems to be changing in a way that's consistent with two stars near each other.
Oh, I see, like as they rotate, it maybe looks like a blob kind of yeah, changing shape.
It looks like a blob. So that's number one. That's the easiest way. That was the first way we've ever done it. The second is that we can use Doppler effects. So you have two stars orbiting each other. Now, so now they have a velocity relative to each other. And so the same way that we measure the velocity of a star relative to the Earth by looking at how it shifts the wavelength of the light that's getting to us, Because if it's moving away from us, it stretches out the wavelength. That makes the wavelengths longer and redder. That's called red shift. But if two stars are orbiting each other, then their velocity relative to the Earth is constantly changing. They're like faster, slower, faster, slower, faster, slower, And so we can measure this changing red shift, and we can deduce that a star that looks just like one actually has this pattern of two stars moving back and forth. We can to tell which light is coming from which star based on the red shift pattern.
Oh, I see, because I guess if it's only one star in that system, that star is not really jiggling, right, it's probably just sitting pretty solidly in the center of its system, not wiggling around or moving around something close by.
That's right, unless there's a big planet there. And so now we have like really really sensitive techniques to measure the lights from these stars to see if there are planets tugging on those stars. And so in the same way we detect exoplanets by seeing that they're tugging on the stars and causing these weird Doppler patterns in the stars, you can see exo stars. Right, you can see that this star is not just one, but it's actually two based on the light that comes frument. It's exactly the same technique.
Wow. So I guess we've been able to see them now for a while, and we actually know a lot about these binary systems, right.
That's right. And there's a third way that we see these binary systems, and that's also borrowed from exoplanets, and that's this eclipse technique that we were talking about. Having two stars line up in front of each other in the same way that we see exoplanets by seeing like how they eclipse their star. In that case, the planet is passing in front of the stars, so it dims the light just a little bit. But we have really precise telescopes to measure that. If one of the stars is brighter than the other, then as it passes in front of the other star, it can eclipse it and it'll change how much light we are seeing, or you get a regular pattern of that you can deduce it it's a binary star system. So a lot of these techniques really come from sort of extrapolating from exoplanet techniques.
And I imagine if they're very different stars, then you could even tell the two apart, right, because stars have kind of like a fingerprint depending on their material, and so you can they have like a very unique signature exactly.
They have a fingerprint just as you said, based on what they're burning, because different elements have different quantum levels and so they give off photons at different energies. And that's also we rely on that for the Doppler pattern.
Right.
You might ask, like, how do you know if the light from a star is red shifted or not? You can't tell what it's like over there. Well you can because you know exactly what energy level hydrogen gives off when it's hot, and we know that energy level, so we can compare what we measure to what we see, and so you're right. If one star is heavier, has more metals than it, it's going to glow with a different set of spikes in the spectrum, and as one passes in front of the other, you'll see like the color of that light literally change as they eclipse each other. It's pretty cool.
Yeah, it's pretty cool because I guess when you look at the sky, I mean, everything just looks like white pinpoints, but there's a ton of information, like you look at the different frequencies, right.
Yeah. It's another great example of how much information about incredible mind blowing stuff is out there, like literally washing over us every day, that we're mostly ignoring.
Well I wouldn't say mostly, I would say largely.
Yeah, except for a few scientists paying attention to a few corners of the universe, most of what the universe is telling us and gets ignored.
Yeah, it's not a popular movie.
But we have done this with lots and lots of stars, like We've looked out there and we have identified more than one hundred thousand binary stars just looking here from Earth.
Right.
Yeah, but you're saying that even though they're more stable the binary system, they're still not super stable, meaning that they are less likely to have planets.
Yeah, because you add a third body and now becomes chaotic. Right, A two body system very stable, happy to orbit around each other for the rest of time. Add a third body, like a planet, and it gets complicated because as those two stars orbit each other, sometimes one gets a little closer to the planet and one gets a little further away, and that adjusts the orbit of the planet. It can knock it off its orbit, and orbits are a little bit fragile. You get to push in the wrong moment in the wrong direction and boom you're rocketing out into space or you're crashing into the Sun. And so these systems are not as likely to have planets as single star systems like ours.
But our Solar system is pretty stable. But we have like a ton of objects in it. Why isn't it chaotic?
We do have a ton of objects, but mostly they're very small and they very far from each other. Like the two biggest objects in the Solar System, the Sun and Jupiter. The Sun dominates the gravity by huge amount. It's like twenty five thousand times more powerful gravitationally than Jupiter. So it's almost like we have a two body system. We can mostly ignore Jupiter and the other planets are so small that they don't really affect us. If they were closer, like they were in the early part of the Solar System, you would have a lot more chaos, and we had a lot more chaos. What we're looking at is sort of like the stable remnant of four billion years of craziness.
Well, I think it's also interesting you were telling me that you can also have like a star and a black hole system, Like you could have a solar system with a star and a black hole in.
It, exactly because sometimes stars become black holes. So what happens if you have two stars and one of them is big enough to collapse eventually into a black hole and the other one isn't, then you get a star orbiting a black hole. And that's super cool. And that's actually the first way that we discovered black holes. We saw this star orbiting something nothing, nothing that we could see at least, and that was great evidence of the existence of a black hole. So we did a whole fun podcast episode about sickness x one. This discovery of a black hole. It's pretty nice because the star that you can see tells you a lot about how much mass is there. From its orbital radius and its velocity, you can deduce its mass and the mass of the black hole.
So it's pretty cool, right, And you could even have like planets orbiting this binary star black hole system. Like you could maybe be on a planet and look up at the sky and there'd be a sun in a black circle, right, and a black hole and you're in the night sky. Like you could have an anti sunset where the black hole, you know, it's below the horizon.
Yeah, what would that be Like? That would be an awesome eclipse, a black hole passing in front of the star. That would be pretty super cool to see.
It would also make me feel a little nervous, you know, to be that close to a black hole. Nerve reckoned enough to be close to a giant exploding star, but now now you're orbiting also a black.
Hole, Yeah, exactly. That would be pretty crazy. And sometimes a binary star system is a little fuzzy, like sometimes the two stars can help each other out, or like they can steal material from each other. For example, this famous kind of supernova, type one A supernova, comes from a binary star system. It only happens under very special conditions. When you have one star that becomes a white dwarf, which means that it's blown out most of its fuel and what's left is just like a hot mass of stuff. It's not fusing anymore. It's just like glowing because it's hot like hot metal does. And it's not massive enough to collapse into a black hole or goes supernova, So otherwise it would just sit there forever, cooling for trillions of years. But if it's got a partner near it, like a really big star orbiting right around it, its gravity can suck in some of the material from that other star and that can trigger supernova. Now it has enough gravity to collapse, and Type one A supernova is the ones that tell us about dark energy and the expansion of the universe. Those are the conditions needed for a type one A supernova. Every single one is exactly that scenario.
Really, all of the type one eighth and those are the ones we used to like map out the universe, right, those are really important for us.
Yeah, exactly. A star that goes supernova by itself, that's called a type two supernova Type one A are these very special conditions from a binary star system with a white dwarf that gobbles energy and mass from his partner to trigger the supernova. So we wouldn't have those without binary star systems. Then we wouldn't have learned so much about the universe.
Interesting, So that's a binary system that's not stable, right, because one of them is getting sucked into the other.
Yeah, exactly, and then when it goes supernova, you can like blow up the other star like that goes totally crazy.
You wouldn't want to be a planet on that system.
You wouldn't want to be a star in that family. Like when one of the Hamsworth brothers blows up.
Sorry, giving a rant in public and people fulfillment with the cell phone and then it's all over for the whole family.
I just meant their career blows up, you know, like one of them becomes Thor the other ones, you know, whatever they're doing, they're.
Not Thor, they're not Thor. I think that's how their parents now call them. Here's my son Thor. This is my other son, not Thor. And this is my other son also out Thor.
Hey, if one of my siblings was a god on screen, and then yes, I would define myself as not that one.
If one of your siblings, yes, I see. Well, I'm sure they're a happy not to be you as well.
Everybody in the universe except for me is happy to not be me.
All right, Well, let's get into more than just two stars in a solar system. Can you have three or four or five or maybe even more than that? But first, let's take another quick break.
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All right, we're talking about multistar systems. Solar systems with more than one or two stars, Daniel, Are those common in the universe? Also? Can you have a solar system with three stars or four stars?
Yeah, it turns out it's not that rare. Like the most common system are single and double systems for the reasons we talked about. But you can actually build a stable system out of more than two stars. You can have a third star, and the trick is to have two of them be like really close to each other and the other one be a little further away. So like a triple star system, you have two stars like at the center, and then instead of a planet, you have like another star out there, and it's sort of a wide orbit around the two stars. But hey, you got three stars in orbit around their common center of mass. So that's a triple system.
And why not, right, I mean, they're consenting cosmological objects, you know, to each their own.
That's right. I believe in polystar systems or whatever you thought.
It polyeah physics. There you go.
We're open minded here on the podcast.
I think what you mean is like having a system kind of like ours, where there's a big something in the middle that's big and happening, and then there's maybe like a third one like Jupiter way out there where it's not really disrupting as much the two star system in the middle.
Yeah, exactly, take our star and split it in two tightly orbiting each other, and then graduate Jupiter into a star. And that's a good mental picture for what a trinary star system might look like. It's not like three stars that are like all whizzing around each other in close quarters.
In some crazy like dance.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's really more like a binary system with an orbiting third partner.
It's like a couple, but then there's someone in the perfriend checking them out.
There's a close friend, a mary couple and close friend.
Yeah, uncle George, we'll just call them Uncle George exactly.
And that's the recipe for building these more complex star systems and having them be stable. For example, if you want a quadruple star system, and there is one, it's called Alpha Geminorum. This is basically two binary star systems orbiting each other. So you have like a tight pair and another tight pair and they're orbiting each other.
Like how far away are we talking about? Like are they really far away or are they like you know, spinning around pretty fast around each other.
Yes, So the two closer ones have periods that are really small, so like the pairs orbit each other in like days, right, so they're really whizzing around each other. But then there's a much bigger separation between the pairs, and that's typical, that's how you become stable. And so the pairs of pairs orbit each other, you know, more like a periods of years, and in other star systems it can be hundreds or thousands of years for the larger set.
I mean, it's not like our solar system. It's more like you know, like a meaning galaxy.
Almost, yes, but they are definitely orbiting each other. They are gravitationally bound to each other, you know, the way like the Ort Cloud is really really far out there, but it's still gravitationally bound to our Sun. And so it's part of our solar system.
I see. So that's the system we actually know about. We can see it, and it's two couples swinging around.
Yeah, and it's really awesome because we originally thought it was a binary system because you can see the two stars visually, right, so you can see the two stars and then when you look at each one, you can tell, oh, my gosh, each one turns out to also be a binary. But you can only tell based on these spectroscopic measurements, the measuring of the light and seeing the Doppler shift.
Whoa that must have been a weird revelation, right.
Yeah, and one at a time. Right, you're like, oh my gosh, this binary star system turns out to be trinary. Let's check out the other one that's binary.
Also, and then it turns into an eight solar sun system.
And yeah, you never know, you never know.
Well, what about more than four stars? So that's a pretty high number. Can you have more than four stars?
You can? There's a system of five stars. This is the glease system. This is organized in sort of a crazy way, like a set of hangars where one hangar hangs off the edge of the other one hangs off the edge of the other one. You have like a binary star system. But then it turns out that one of them looks like a binary star, right, so you have instead of having a binary star system, that you have a trinary. Then you zoom in on one of those in the binary and it turns out that's a binary. What And then you zoom in on one of those in that binary and that turns out to be a binary no, yes, like a nested yeah. And really that's the only way to be stable is to have these things be separated into like effectively two body systems. But where one of the bodies turns out to have complicated like inner motion. So this one is like a four level hierarchy, and this is called the Glease system g l I e SE.
You need like a hierarchy, But is that hierarchy due to the size like each as you go down a level, the suns get smaller? Are they all the same size? They just happened to like be trapped in these hierarchical orbits.
Now they don't have to be smaller, they can be larger. They can even be larger, But then you just need the orbits to be a little bit bigger, so that effectively it looks like a single star system from the distance of the other star. Right, you just need to be to be small enough, or them to be close enough, or for you to be far enough away that you can mostly treat a binary system like a single star for it to be stable.
I wonder what it's like to be a planet in that system. Is it just like a constant disco ball, you know, it's experienced day and night like light flashing in and out.
Well, some of the stars are going to be so distant that they're just look like moons, right or they're gonna look like other things.
Well, I give this one a five star rating for sure for having five stars.
But wait, there's more.
Yeah, is it possible to have more?
Yeah, we have found star systems with more than five stars. There's one we saw recently which is a crazy six star system. This one has like three pairs of binaries, so you have like three of these little guys and that's organized into a triinary system.
Whoa, so it's three binary stars. But is it hierarchical? Like is do you have like a binary star and then the binary system orbiting that one, and then you have a binary system orbiting the other one.
You have two binary systems where they have like a larger one and a smaller one, and then those two are organized into a binary and then that quad star system is in a binary relationship with another binary star system. So it's definitely hierarchical.
It's like a seventy swinging party in space. Yeah.
And I don't know if they have any planets. We haven't seen any, but it's pretty crazy.
Why wouldn't they have planets?
Well, it's just soaotic, right, There's so much gravity all the time that it'd be pretty hard to find the stable orbit. Like, it's amazing that even these found a stable orbit.
Right, I guess how did they find that orbit? They do you think they were born, you know, near each other and that's just what they settled into. Or do you think they you know, one of them was cruising by and God pulled in.
It's actually really hard to capture another object like gravitationally, it's actually impossible to capture an object that's passing by because of conservation of energy. If it's coming by and it's not in orbit, that means it's on a hyperbolic trajectory. And if it unless it loses energy somehow, it's just going to whizzer around you and shoot out into space. So to capture an object, you need like something else to give away energy or collide with it or something. So much more likely is that this formed this way, that it came together this way gravitationally, from the initial collapse in clouds. It just happened to form six points there that gobble up a lot of the mass and then coalesced into this stable system.
And then these are pretty rare, right, Like we only know of one.
Yeah, this is really rare. There's very few systems like this, and this particular one is super weird because not only does it have like six stars in it, but they are eclipsing. So these stars are all eclipsing binaries, which means that all of them orbit each other in just the right plane so that they block the light from each other on its way to Earth. So it's like, not only is it weird, but they all happen to be arranged in exactly the right way to eclipse each other's light from the point of view of.
Earth, like they're on the same level, and this level just happens to be like in our eye line.
Yeah. And so this was discovered by a test which is this awesome telescope that looks for exoplanets via this transit method dimming of the light of a star to see something passing in front of it. And so it detected all of these crazy activities in this one solar system.
Wow, it was like blinking like crazy, like randomly.
Yeah. And just like in the other hierarchies, like the closer, the little binaries orbit each other sometimes days or years. The furthest pair, like the quad system that's orbiting around the other binary system, they orbit every two thousand years. This was really like a quad couple that's much closer, and then a binary system that's a little further away. But they are tied together.
Wow, well that's kind of romantic. They've been together for two thousand years. That's something to aspired to. But now I'm afraid to ask, Daniel, can you have a solar system with more than six stars?
You know you can? And we have found one. The craziest star system we've ever seen has seven stars in it. And this is a star system called New SCORPII, which is pretty awesome name is five hundred light years away and it has seven stars. It's like, geez, get greedy much.
They just like the party.
I guess we're just jealous, right, I'm like, man, they're having a lot more fun over there than we are.
I think with each start there's just more drama, you know it least that soap opera in your life.
Some people can't live without it. But this seven star system is sort of organized into two systems. One of them has four stars and the other one is three, and those two systems orbit each other. But it's really cool. In hierarchical it's hard to describe. Over the radio, so I suggest you google it. But it's a pretty cool system.
Like two clusters that are kind of far away enough from each other that they don't destabilize each other, but they're orbiting around each other, and each one of those clusters has another two separate clusters within them.
Yeah, exactly. It's pretty crazy. And so you know, life on that planet with like seven sunrises and seven sunsets every day, that sounds pretty exciting.
Imagine having seven parents has kind of be pretty confusing, like how do you make decisions. I guess you pull all your parents and the majority wins.
Well, mommy said I could have dessert. Yeah, which mommy.
Mom said that I can have a treat. The majority of my mom said I can have a treat. All right. Well, I give the universe, you're right, a lot of stars for being so awesome and unpredictable. I mean, who would have thought that you could have seven stars in one system.
It's pretty cool, and it's just an example of how the universe does stuff that you didn't expect. It does exactly what you didn't anticipate, and that everything we've thought we've learned about the universe from the last thousand years, assumptions that were at the bedrock of our understanding should be questioned because they could be wrong and things could be very different out there in other corners of the universe.
I'm starting to question YELP reviews. Maybe they should go up to seven stars because the universe has set the bar, the stars bar. All right, well, we hope you enjoyed that. And speaking of stars, give us a good rating on iTunes or Spotify or wherever you're listening to this podcast, and tell your friends thanks for joining us. See you next time.
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