Seeing Double—Part 1

I have posted several blogs here about stars; describing meditations that come to me, as I soak in the tub under dark winter skies, while becoming absorbed in the heavens. It is now late fall. The trees above my tub have dropped their leaves and the sky turns inky dark by 8 PM. This provides me with wonderful stargazing opportunities. Bring the winter on! I love my summer evenings in the tub, since I can watch the ever-morphing clouds and the graceful, leafy trees sway in the balmy breezes above me; but there’s something very special about cold weather’s dark, starry skies.

I lie back, floating in the hot water, and fix my gaze on one patch of sky, slowly becoming absorbed into its star field. Some stars are bright, some dim; some are farther away than others; some gather in clusters and nebula. The patterns (especially the constellation-like figures) mesmerize me. I become aware that I’m peering into a three-dimensional star field that has depth, rather than just viewing points of light which all seem to emanate from the same distant celestial sphere.

I sometimes ponder the fact that about half the stars I see are really binary systems: two stars that dance closely around each other, rather than standing as solitary suns like ours. I rarely can resolve the pair by naked eye, but astronomy’s large telescopes can do that, to show us that many of them are truly double stars. In fact, many of them are actually multiple star systems, where one or two additional small, almost invisible, minor stars add to the complex dance.

A recent issue of Scientific American magazine has an article on binary stars and their planets, titled “Worlds With Two Suns,” by two cosmologists. Until recently, some astronomers tended to doubt that binary stars could even have planets orbiting them—let alone that they would have a chance of harboring life on their worlds. This is because a planet attached to a double star system could randomly be jerked around by the competing pull of the two stars. Such planets would not settle into stable orbits, or, worse yet, could even get sucked into one of the suns, or flung off into deep space by the opposing tug of the double stars. The complex gravitational field a planet would be forced to negotiate would cause its orbit to be too chaotic—most certainly too disordered for life ever to be able to take hold.

More on double suns next time...