August 10, 2021 • 47 mins
Daniel and Jorge talk about binary star systems, trinary star systems and totally bonkers star systems with even more stars!
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Speaker 1 (00:08):
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 athlete brothers. I think there are three
(00:30):
hemps Worth 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. Hi am or him and cartoonists
(01:05):
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 for there were to 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
(01:28):
who are all these people? You mean? You're physicists and
you didn't know police making the movies or radio stars. Yeah,
it's always 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 on
the Walk of Fame. Think if they give you a
Nobel Prize and then they put the metal on the
floor in a busy intersection. Exactly. They don't pave the
(01:49):
streets with busts and Nobel Prize winners, right, but maybe
they should. They should. They need some more humility, for sure.
Would you take a Hollywood start they offered you one
for what? Maybe for a podcast? 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 aprilucent of
(02:12):
I Heart Radio, 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 serve on the waves of your curiosity to
ask the biggest, deepest questions about the universe, not just
about stars, about about where they come from and where
they end up, how they all work, and what it
(02:33):
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. Where 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.
(02:56):
Are you the listeners? Oh? Could 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 clumbs that glow so brightly. Imagine if
most of the universe was dark, it wasn't glowing, it
(03:18):
would be so 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 illuminated
for us. Like literally, Yeah, that's why. 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 down the
bootleg versions of it. That's right, And that's why people
(03:39):
like summer more than winter, right, because the Sun is
the star over closer to the star of our solar system. Yeah, exactly,
we feel closer to it, and we literally feel it's warmth.
I mean, it's incredible that this star, which is a
burning ball of plasma nine 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 bond
(04:00):
fire that's so hot you can stand near it, take
a few steps back and it just dissipates. Right, Well, now,
imagine a bonfire 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 it pretty
hot here. It's blowing up all the time. It should
get a star on the Walk of Fame. It's pretty famous.
(04:21):
It's the biggest star out there. We I like it,
you know, I mean I can't look at it directly,
but till its pressence half a half of the time.
It's been in a lot of movies, right, It's IMDb
page is amazing as a long list of credits. Yes,
every living human being, an animal, and plant and insect
is credited to our son exactly. It should at least
(04:42):
get acknowledgements in like every paper. Scientists should be acknowledging
it and thank you to the Sun for providing all
the energy we use. I'm gonna do that next time. Seriously,
it 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 us right,
and our solar system, for the longest time, was the
(05:02):
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
(05:23):
we are weird, that we are unusual compared to what's
out there in the universe. So you gotta 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 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
(05:43):
mean like the royal We like the royal family, especially us,
the kings of this podcast. Do we have a dual
king monarchy in this podcast or is one of those
we're cokings. I think we're cokings. That's why we do
in this podcast. We coke up on the universe. We
sniff up the deliciousness of the universe. Oh man, I
(06:04):
was thinking coca cola, but dark 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 realized that our
sun was a star, just like those little pin points
you see in the night sky. Like, was that a
(06:25):
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,
(06:47):
and including all those stars, and so understanding that the
Sun was a star suggested that all those other pin
pricks in the sky were also probably solar systems that
might have planets on them. And you write 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
(07:09):
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 zillions 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
their planets in life around those solar systems? While it
suggests that there might be, because we know that our
(07:30):
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
(07:53):
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 that in Poland? Isn't that the same throughout?
I'm world famous in Poland? That's a classic mel Brooks joke. Yeah,
but we didn't know, like maybe the planetary formation was
really unusual, and most stars just form as stars, right,
(08:13):
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 their 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,
(08:35):
but I think most people assume them. 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 this this 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.
(08:58):
And if they're really far away, basically every other star is,
it's not always easy to make them out by I. So,
so some things that you see in the sky might
be binary or triinary or even crazier star systems. Yeah,
but they're so far away they they look like one
pin point, right, Yeah, unless you have a really powerful
telescope or use some cool techniques we're gonna talk about today,
(09:19):
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 still our stars? Are these like YELP
review stars? There's no limit on how many stars you
(09:42):
can give on YELL. I think you can be like,
I think five is the most? Can you give ten stars?
And yell? Isn't there some premium subscription version we can
give as many stars that you want and if not, yelp,
I totally suggest you offer that to people. Yeah, let
people be effusive, right, because I would give our solar
system totally t out of five stars only ten, Daniel,
(10:02):
Come on, I mean that's double the maximum and being
generous here, like, like, are you looking at other solar
systems thinking maybe they have better boba ti 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
(10:23):
can say ten out of five. I would totally evolve here. Again,
it seems really 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 it's purely subjective.
I totally agree. I have no scientific system for rating
solar systems. Well, I would give our solars some I
(10:45):
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 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 their
(11:06):
binary star systems out there, but like how many can
you fit into one place? Like ten twenty? 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
(11:28):
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 is
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 define our existence around,
isn't necessarily representative. That we've got to keep our minds
(11:50):
open to other kinds of stellar families. Yeah, and it
made me think of Star Wars, you know, and that
famous scene in that first 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 like pattern of day
and night. I don't know how you could be a
farmer on a planet with two sons. You'd have two ships.
Maybe you have some crazy almanac. You're like, Okay, it's summer, now,
(12:14):
it's double summer. Now, it's half summer. Now it's sort
of winter. You know, like if the seasons it would
just be nuts, right right, Well, let's get into it, Daniel,
how many stars can a solar system have? And so,
as usually, we were wondering how many people out there
have 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
(12:34):
for 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 have lent your voice
to these questions. Please write to us two questions at
Daniel and Jorge 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, Um, a
(12:57):
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
(13:21):
I think it can have more than one star. I
think a solar system can have one or two stars. Um,
we have one star that is our sun, and then
there are binary systems, which consists of two stars orbiting
around each other, and I think it is possible for
(13:42):
there to be like planetary objects orbiting them. You have
binary stars and triple star systems. Whether there's any limit
onto it, I doubt it. As long as it's contentionally locked.
I don't think they se limit. But at some point
it will stop being a solar system become a galaxy. Well,
(14:04):
I know that there are binary systems, which would mean
two stars. I don't see why they couldn't be three stars.
I in a solar system, and I think I saw
a science fiction program where they mentioned as seven star
solar system, but that was science fiction, probably not based
(14:26):
in fact. But I really don't know what the upper
limit would be, probably something between three and seven. I'm
not sure of a physical limit. A solar system can
certainly have multiple stars. I know binary stars are very common.
(14:48):
I'm not sure if there's anything to say that you
couldn't have ten stars or in some amazing orbit around
each other. I suspect in nurse stellar nursery, whether they're
all quite compact. You have a lot of stars in
close proximity that have a gravitational impact on each other. Well,
a solar system, you can probably have a bunch of
(15:10):
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
(15:30):
if you have more and more stars. Things get a
little chaotic when you have a bunch of things orbiting
each other. So I'm gonna 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,
(15:51):
I feel like binary star is a common phrase. Yeah,
people are being conservative here. They're not, like, you know,
reaching out and imagining solar systems with like fifties stars
and of and stuff like that. I think it just
goes to show you that people think of solar systems
as dominated by a star or maybe two and then
planets around it. Right. I guess it's hard to wrap
your head a right, it might just be like chaos,
like who would win or who would be the dominant star?
(16:13):
Or 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 Robert's rule to make decisions about
orbits and things like that. So you're in favor of
socialism when it comes to organisms, sellar Sylar semi favorite
solar socialism. Yes, the s S s S cosmic social
(16:37):
Society of Socialist Solar Systems and communistic cosmologists. Nice. Nice,
but then it gets all eaten up by a democratic
dark matter. Unfortunately, dark matter will totally win the vote,
actually because it totally would out vote us. Right, we
do not want there, you go, it's more autocratic, I think,
(16:57):
astronomically autocratic. Yeah, it's just like an 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, No, I didn't. But I like this person
who said that they've seen a star system with seven
(17:18):
stars in science fiction. Yeah. Yeah, that means that authors
out there have been creative in imagining the in 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 yell IMDb? Daniel? Are you
(17:39):
reviewing movies on yelled? 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 has two stars.
So let's talk about for 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 it? Yeah, most of them are binary star systems,
but we'll talk later about solar systems with even more stars.
(18:01):
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 I'm about
a third, right, Like it's not in my eyesight necessarily, yeah,
or you know, stop having drinks or whatever, but yeah, exactly.
(18:22):
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
they 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 initial building blocks of
(18:44):
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 a
really big cloud 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
(19:04):
the same time. And so sometimes those stars formed 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 form 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
(19:27):
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 reunions are sort of close enough together that
they form a system together. Yeah, and you can imagine
(19:48):
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's been a little
bit further away, or the dynamics of how things have
been distributed had been different, you might have had a
(20:10):
more balanced distribution between the Sun and Jupiter. Interesting, like
we could have had a binary system. Like if Jupiter
had turned on or eating 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 foulside, right,
you can have two places where things start to accumulate
(20:30):
and 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 tattooeding 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
(20:51):
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 in a different spot
in the Solar system. We had this whole fun podcast
episode 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
(21:11):
formed a very tight binary spiral with our son, or
they might have even merged. I guess the question for
me is that if you have these two big things
in the 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? And so let's get into that
and maybe more star systems, but more stars in them
(21:34):
than two. But first, let's take a quick break. We're
talking about two star systems, systems with multiple stars in them,
and we started with two. Daniel, what is it like
(21:55):
to have a two stars in your system? Like, well,
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 and do each other and
(22:17):
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 would have the
two stars circling 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 at the center and everything
moving around it, think about it like two stars at
(22:37):
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 that like the middle point
between them. Yeah, if your 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
(23:00):
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, you would only see one star,
(23:21):
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'll be orbiting both of them. And so like having
a crazy system like we were talking about before, where
you like passed 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
(23:44):
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 the 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,
(24:05):
but they might change in size relatively chick 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 son's sun eclipse, right,
because they could be different brightnesses and different colors. You
have like a red star and a yellow star, and
(24:26):
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, I'd be
awesome for artists. You know that golden hour the photographers
like to use at the beach trying to be like
lots of different kinds of colored hours cool. Alright, So
then and and these systems are stable. You say these
(24:47):
systems are stable. The two body system can be stable.
Three body system is very complicated, and we're gonna have
a old 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 body by putting
(25:09):
two of them close to each other, so you can
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 triinary star systems formed.
We have three stars all forming together, but that's a
very unstable situation. And so that's why we have a
(25:31):
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 injected anyway. Well, I guess the
third one is not as famous. Yeah, exactly. But you
kind of blew my mind when you said about a
(25:53):
third of stars out there are binary systems. And I
guess maybe a question is like, how do we know,
Like in the nice sky, they just look like pinpoints.
How do we know that there are two in each
of those pinpoints? 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
(26:15):
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, or it's all along, 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 it looks like a
blob kind of changing shape. It looks like a blob.
So that's number one. That's the easiest way. That was
(26:37):
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
(26:59):
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 slow or 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
(27:19):
can tell which light is coming from which star based
on the red shift pattern I see, because I guess
if 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 wriggling
around or moving around something close by. That's right, unless
there's a big planet there. And so now we have
(27:40):
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
exo planets 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
(28:01):
on the light that comes from 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
(28:22):
exo planets 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 are 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, it will change how much light we
are seeing. You get a regular pattern of that, you
can deduce it. It's a binary star system. So a
(28:45):
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 it to apart, right, because
stars have kind of like a fingerprint depending on their material,
and so you can be have like a very unique nature. Exactly.
They have a fingerprint just as you said, based on
what they're burning, because different elements have different quantum levels
(29:06):
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. What 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.
(29:28):
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 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 if you look at the different frequencies. Right. Yeah,
(29:49):
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. I wouldn't say mostly,
I largely. Except for a few scientists paying attention to
a few corners in the universe, most of what the
universe is telling us and gets ignored. Yeah, it's not.
(30:11):
But we have done this with lots and lots of stars,
Like we have looked out there and we have identified
more than a hundred thousand binary stars just looking here
from Earth. Right. Yeah, but you're saying that even though
they're more stable binary system, that they're still not super stable,
meaning that they are less likely to have planets. Yeah,
because you had a third body now becomes chaotic, right,
(30:33):
A two body system very stable, happy to orbit around
each other for the rest of time at 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 adjust the orbit of the planet. It can
knock it off. Its orbit and orbits are a little
bit fragile. You get a push in the wrong moment
(30:56):
in the wrong direction and boom you're rocketing out into
space or your arashing 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 very far from each other,
(31:16):
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
(31:37):
the Solar System, you would have a lot more chaos,
and we had a lot more chaos. Well 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.
(31:58):
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
(32:19):
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 can
even have like planets orbiting this binary star black hole system.
(32:42):
Like you could maybe be on a planet and look
up at the sky and there be a sun and
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
(33:04):
that close to a black hole. It's a nerve wrecking
enough to be close to it 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, of this famous kind
(33:25):
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
(33:46):
to collapse into a black hole or go 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, it's
gravity can suck in some of the mater curial from
that other star and that can trigger a supernova. Now
it has enough gravity to collapse, and Type one A
(34:07):
supernova is the one that tell us about dark energy
and 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 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. So Type one A are these very
(34:28):
special conditions from a binary star system with a white
dwarf that gobbles energy and mass from its partner to
trigger the supernova. So we wouldn't have those without binary
star systems, so 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
(34:48):
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 hands with brothers blows up, sorry
giving a ra in public and people ful filled it
with the cell phone, then it's all over for the
whole family. I just meant their career blows up, you know,
like one of them becomes Thor and the other ones,
you know, whatever they're doing, they're not Thor, they're not Thor.
(35:11):
I think that's how their parents now call them. This
is my son Thor, which is my other son, not Thor.
And this is my other son Awsome, not Thor. Hey,
if one of my siblings was a god on screen,
and then yes, I would define myself. Is not that one?
If one of your siblings, I see, well, I'm sure
they're happy not to be you as well. Everybody in
(35:34):
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 sism. You can you have three
or four or five or maybe even more than that.
But first, let's take another quick break. All right, we're
(36:00):
talking about multi star 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 systems 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.
(36:23):
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 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've
got three stars in orbit around their common center of mass.
(36:44):
So that's a triple system. And why not, right, I mean,
they're consensing cosmological objects, you know, to each their own
that's right. I believe in polly star systems or whatever
you thought it, Polly physics. There you go. We're open
minded here on the podcast. I think what you mean
is like haveing a system kind of like ours, where
there's a big there's something in the middle that's big
and happening, and then there's maybe like a third one
(37:06):
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 into 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 are
like all whizzing around each other in close quarters in
(37:28):
some crazy like dance. 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 preference checking them out.
There's a close friend, a camry couple, a close friends
Uncle George, we'll just call him uncle George, exactly. And
that's the recipe for building these more complex star systems
(37:48):
and having them be stable. For example, if you want
a quadruple star system, and there is one, it's called
Alpha Jeminorum. 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
(38:11):
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 in a period of years,
(38:32):
and in other star systems it can be hundreds or
thousands of years for the larger set. I mean, it's
it's not like our solar system. It's more like you know,
like a Meani galaxy almost, yes, sort of. But they
are definitely orbiting each other. They are gravitationally bound to
each other, you know, the way like the Orc cloud
is really really far out there, but it's still gravitationally
(38:52):
bound to our Sun, and so it's part of our
solar system. I see. So that's a system we actually
know about what we can see it. 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
(39:14):
based on these spectroscopic measurements, the measuring of light and
seeing the Doppler shift. Well, 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 triinary. Let's check out the other one
that's binary. And then it turns into an eight solar
sun system. And yeah, you never know, you never know. Well,
(39:35):
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 out the edge of
the other one. You have like a binary star system.
But then it turns out that one of them looks
(39:57):
like a binary star, right, so you have instead of
a binary star system, now you have a trinary. Then
you zoom in on one of those in the binary,
and turns out that's a binary. And then you zoom
in on one of those in that binary, and that
turns out to be a binary. 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
(40:19):
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 S E. You need
like a hierarchy, But is that hierarchy due to the
size like each as you go down a level, the
sun's get smaller. Are they all the same size? It
just happened to like be trapped in this hierarchical orbits.
(40:42):
They don't have to be smaller. They can be large,
and 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 then 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
(41:03):
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 gonna 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,
(41:23):
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
(41:46):
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 Sementi swinging party in space. Yeah, and I
(42:09):
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 so chaotic, right, there's so much gravity all
the time that would be pretty hard to find a
stable orbit. Like, it's amazing that even these found a
stable orbit, right, I guess how did they find that orbit?
Did they? Do you think they were born, you know,
near each other and that's just what they settled into.
(42:29):
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 not a hyperbolic trajectory. And if it
unless it loses energy somehow, it's just gonna whizz around
(42:51):
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 cloud. It
just happened to form six points there that gobble up
a lot of the mass and then coalesced into this
(43:11):
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
(43:34):
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 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 eyeline. Yeah,
And so this was discovered by a test, which is
this awesome telescope that looks for exoplanets via this transit
(43:55):
method of dimming of the light of a star to
see something passing in front of it. And so we
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, but
the furthest pair, like the quad system that's orbiting around
(44:18):
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
aspire 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
(44:40):
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. It's five 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
(45:00):
there than we are. I think with each start there's
just more drama. You know, that's soap operated 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 has three,
and those two systems orbit each other. But it's really cool,
hierarchic goal. It's hard to describe over the radio, so
(45:21):
I suggest you google it. But it's 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,
(45:43):
that sounds pretty exciting. Imagine having seven parents, that's gonna
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, which mommy mom said
that I can have a treat. The majority of my
mom said I never treat, all right, well, I give
the universe, you're right, a lot of stars for being
(46:06):
so awesome and unpredictable. I mean, who would have thought
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 thought we've learned about
the universe from last thousand years, assumptions that were at
the bedrock of our understanding, should be questioned because they
(46:27):
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 said in 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 or wherever you're listening to this podcast,
and tell your friends thanks for joining us. See you
(46:49):
next time. Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel and
joor Hicks Blame the Universe is a production of I
Heart Radio or more podcast from my Heart Radio. Visit
the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows h
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 athlete brothers. I think there are three
(00:30):
hemps Worth 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. Hi am or him and cartoonists
(01:05):
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 for there were to 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
(01:28):
who are all these people? You mean? You're physicists and
you didn't know police making the movies or radio stars. Yeah,
it's always 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 on
the Walk of Fame. Think if they give you a
Nobel Prize and then they put the metal on the
floor in a busy intersection. Exactly. They don't pave the
(01:49):
streets with busts and Nobel Prize winners, right, but maybe
they should. They should. They need some more humility, for sure.
Would you take a Hollywood start they offered you one
for what? Maybe for a podcast? 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 aprilucent of
(02:12):
I Heart Radio, 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 serve on the waves of your curiosity to
ask the biggest, deepest questions about the universe, not just
about stars, about about where they come from and where
they end up, how they all work, and what it
(02:33):
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. Where 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.
(02:56):
Are you the listeners? Oh? Could 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 clumbs that glow so brightly. Imagine if
most of the universe was dark, it wasn't glowing, it
(03:18):
would be so 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 illuminated
for us. Like literally, Yeah, that's why. 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 down the
bootleg versions of it. That's right, And that's why people
(03:39):
like summer more than winter, right, because the Sun is
the star over closer to the star of our solar system. Yeah, exactly,
we feel closer to it, and we literally feel it's warmth.
I mean, it's incredible that this star, which is a
burning ball of plasma nine 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 bond
(04:00):
fire that's so hot you can stand near it, take
a few steps back and it just dissipates. Right, Well, now,
imagine a bonfire 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 it pretty
hot here. It's blowing up all the time. It should
get a star on the Walk of Fame. It's pretty famous.
(04:21):
It's the biggest star out there. We I like it,
you know, I mean I can't look at it directly,
but till its pressence half a half of the time.
It's been in a lot of movies, right, It's IMDb
page is amazing as a long list of credits. Yes,
every living human being, an animal, and plant and insect
is credited to our son exactly. It should at least
(04:42):
get acknowledgements in like every paper. Scientists should be acknowledging
it and thank you to the Sun for providing all
the energy we use. I'm gonna do that next time. Seriously,
it 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 us right,
and our solar system, for the longest time, was the
(05:02):
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
(05:23):
we are weird, that we are unusual compared to what's
out there in the universe. So you gotta 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 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
(05:43):
mean like the royal We like the royal family, especially us,
the kings of this podcast. Do we have a dual
king monarchy in this podcast or is one of those
we're cokings. I think we're cokings. That's why we do
in this podcast. We coke up on the universe. We
sniff up the deliciousness of the universe. Oh man, I
(06:04):
was thinking coca cola, but dark 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 realized that our
sun was a star, just like those little pin points
you see in the night sky. Like, was that a
(06:25):
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,
(06:47):
and including all those stars, and so understanding that the
Sun was a star suggested that all those other pin
pricks in the sky were also probably solar systems that
might have planets on them. And you write 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
(07:09):
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 zillions 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
their planets in life around those solar systems? While it
suggests that there might be, because we know that our
(07:30):
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
(07:53):
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 that in Poland? Isn't that the same throughout?
I'm world famous in Poland? That's a classic mel Brooks joke. Yeah,
but we didn't know, like maybe the planetary formation was
really unusual, and most stars just form as stars, right,
(08:13):
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 their 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,
(08:35):
but I think most people assume them. 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 this this 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.
(08:58):
And if they're really far away, basically every other star is,
it's not always easy to make them out by I. So,
so some things that you see in the sky might
be binary or triinary or even crazier star systems. Yeah,
but they're so far away they they look like one
pin point, right, Yeah, unless you have a really powerful
telescope or use some cool techniques we're gonna talk about today,
(09:19):
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 still our stars? Are these like YELP
review stars? There's no limit on how many stars you
(09:42):
can give on YELL. I think you can be like,
I think five is the most? Can you give ten stars?
And yell? Isn't there some premium subscription version we can
give as many stars that you want and if not, yelp,
I totally suggest you offer that to people. Yeah, let
people be effusive, right, because I would give our solar
system totally t out of five stars only ten, Daniel,
(10:02):
Come on, I mean that's double the maximum and being
generous here, like, like, are you looking at other solar
systems thinking maybe they have better boba ti 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
(10:23):
can say ten out of five. I would totally evolve here. Again,
it seems really 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 it's purely subjective.
I totally agree. I have no scientific system for rating
solar systems. Well, I would give our solars some I
(10:45):
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 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 their
(11:06):
binary star systems out there, but like how many can
you fit into one place? Like ten twenty? 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
(11:28):
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 is
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 define our existence around,
isn't necessarily representative. That we've got to keep our minds
(11:50):
open to other kinds of stellar families. Yeah, and it
made me think of Star Wars, you know, and that
famous scene in that first 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 like pattern of day
and night. I don't know how you could be a
farmer on a planet with two sons. You'd have two ships.
Maybe you have some crazy almanac. You're like, Okay, it's summer, now,
(12:14):
it's double summer. Now, it's half summer. Now it's sort
of winter. You know, like if the seasons it would
just be nuts, right right, Well, let's get into it, Daniel,
how many stars can a solar system have? And so,
as usually, we were wondering how many people out there
have 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
(12:34):
for 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 have lent your voice
to these questions. Please write to us two questions at
Daniel and Jorge 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, Um, a
(12:57):
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
(13:21):
I think it can have more than one star. I
think a solar system can have one or two stars. Um,
we have one star that is our sun, and then
there are binary systems, which consists of two stars orbiting
around each other, and I think it is possible for
(13:42):
there to be like planetary objects orbiting them. You have
binary stars and triple star systems. Whether there's any limit
onto it, I doubt it. As long as it's contentionally locked.
I don't think they se limit. But at some point
it will stop being a solar system become a galaxy. Well,
(14:04):
I know that there are binary systems, which would mean
two stars. I don't see why they couldn't be three stars.
I in a solar system, and I think I saw
a science fiction program where they mentioned as seven star
solar system, but that was science fiction, probably not based
(14:26):
in fact. But I really don't know what the upper
limit would be, probably something between three and seven. I'm
not sure of a physical limit. A solar system can
certainly have multiple stars. I know binary stars are very common.
(14:48):
I'm not sure if there's anything to say that you
couldn't have ten stars or in some amazing orbit around
each other. I suspect in nurse stellar nursery, whether they're
all quite compact. You have a lot of stars in
close proximity that have a gravitational impact on each other. Well,
a solar system, you can probably have a bunch of
(15:10):
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
(15:30):
if you have more and more stars. Things get a
little chaotic when you have a bunch of things orbiting
each other. So I'm gonna 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,
(15:51):
I feel like binary star is a common phrase. Yeah,
people are being conservative here. They're not, like, you know,
reaching out and imagining solar systems with like fifties stars
and of and stuff like that. I think it just
goes to show you that people think of solar systems
as dominated by a star or maybe two and then
planets around it. Right. I guess it's hard to wrap
your head a right, it might just be like chaos,
like who would win or who would be the dominant star?
(16:13):
Or 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 Robert's rule to make decisions about
orbits and things like that. So you're in favor of
socialism when it comes to organisms, sellar Sylar semi favorite
solar socialism. Yes, the s S s S cosmic social
(16:37):
Society of Socialist Solar Systems and communistic cosmologists. Nice. Nice,
but then it gets all eaten up by a democratic
dark matter. Unfortunately, dark matter will totally win the vote,
actually because it totally would out vote us. Right, we
do not want there, you go, it's more autocratic, I think,
(16:57):
astronomically autocratic. Yeah, it's just like an 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, No, I didn't. But I like this person
who said that they've seen a star system with seven
(17:18):
stars in science fiction. Yeah. Yeah, that means that authors
out there have been creative in imagining the in 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 yell IMDb? Daniel? Are you
(17:39):
reviewing movies on yelled? 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 has two stars.
So let's talk about for 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 it? Yeah, most of them are binary star systems,
but we'll talk later about solar systems with even more stars.
(18:01):
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 I'm about
a third, right, Like it's not in my eyesight necessarily, yeah,
or you know, stop having drinks or whatever, but yeah, exactly.
(18:22):
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
they 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 initial building blocks of
(18:44):
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 a
really big cloud 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
(19:04):
the same time. And so sometimes those stars formed 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 form 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
(19:27):
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 reunions are sort of close enough together that
they form a system together. Yeah, and you can imagine
(19:48):
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's been a little
bit further away, or the dynamics of how things have
been distributed had been different, you might have had a
(20:10):
more balanced distribution between the Sun and Jupiter. Interesting, like
we could have had a binary system. Like if Jupiter
had turned on or eating 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 foulside, right,
you can have two places where things start to accumulate
(20:30):
and 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 tattooeding 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
(20:51):
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 in a different spot
in the Solar system. We had this whole fun podcast
episode 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
(21:11):
formed a very tight binary spiral with our son, or
they might have even merged. I guess the question for
me is that if you have these two big things
in the 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? And so let's get into that
and maybe more star systems, but more stars in them
(21:34):
than two. But first, let's take a quick break. We're
talking about two star systems, systems with multiple stars in them,
and we started with two. Daniel, what is it like
(21:55):
to have a two stars in your system? Like, well,
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 and do each other and
(22:17):
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 would have the
two stars circling 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 at the center and everything
moving around it, think about it like two stars at
(22:37):
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 that like the middle point
between them. Yeah, if your 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
(23:00):
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, you would only see one star,
(23:21):
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'll be orbiting both of them. And so like having
a crazy system like we were talking about before, where
you like passed 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
(23:44):
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 the 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,
(24:05):
but they might change in size relatively chick 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 son's sun eclipse, right,
because they could be different brightnesses and different colors. You
have like a red star and a yellow star, and
(24:26):
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, I'd be
awesome for artists. You know that golden hour the photographers
like to use at the beach trying to be like
lots of different kinds of colored hours cool. Alright, So
then and and these systems are stable. You say these
(24:47):
systems are stable. The two body system can be stable.
Three body system is very complicated, and we're gonna have
a old 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 body by putting
(25:09):
two of them close to each other, so you can
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 triinary star systems formed.
We have three stars all forming together, but that's a
very unstable situation. And so that's why we have a
(25:31):
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 injected anyway. Well, I guess the
third one is not as famous. Yeah, exactly. But you
kind of blew my mind when you said about a
(25:53):
third of stars out there are binary systems. And I
guess maybe a question is like, how do we know,
Like in the nice sky, they just look like pinpoints.
How do we know that there are two in each
of those pinpoints? 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
(26:15):
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, or it's all along, 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 it looks like a
blob kind of changing shape. It looks like a blob.
So that's number one. That's the easiest way. That was
(26:37):
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
(26:59):
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 slow or 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
(27:19):
can tell which light is coming from which star based
on the red shift pattern I see, because I guess
if 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 wriggling
around or moving around something close by. That's right, unless
there's a big planet there. And so now we have
(27:40):
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
exo planets 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
(28:01):
on the light that comes from 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
(28:22):
exo planets 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 are 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, it will change how much light we
are seeing. You get a regular pattern of that, you
can deduce it. It's a binary star system. So a
(28:45):
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 it to apart, right, because
stars have kind of like a fingerprint depending on their material,
and so you can be have like a very unique nature. Exactly.
They have a fingerprint just as you said, based on
what they're burning, because different elements have different quantum levels
(29:06):
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. What 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.
(29:28):
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 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 if you look at the different frequencies. Right. Yeah,
(29:49):
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. I wouldn't say mostly,
I largely. Except for a few scientists paying attention to
a few corners in the universe, most of what the
universe is telling us and gets ignored. Yeah, it's not.
(30:11):
But we have done this with lots and lots of stars,
Like we have looked out there and we have identified
more than a hundred thousand binary stars just looking here
from Earth. Right. Yeah, but you're saying that even though
they're more stable binary system, that they're still not super stable,
meaning that they are less likely to have planets. Yeah,
because you had a third body now becomes chaotic, right,
(30:33):
A two body system very stable, happy to orbit around
each other for the rest of time at 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 adjust the orbit of the planet. It can
knock it off. Its orbit and orbits are a little
bit fragile. You get a push in the wrong moment
(30:56):
in the wrong direction and boom you're rocketing out into
space or your arashing 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 very far from each other,
(31:16):
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
(31:37):
the Solar System, you would have a lot more chaos,
and we had a lot more chaos. Well 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.
(31:58):
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
(32:19):
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 can
even have like planets orbiting this binary star black hole system.
(32:42):
Like you could maybe be on a planet and look
up at the sky and there be a sun and
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
(33:04):
that close to a black hole. It's a nerve wrecking
enough to be close to it 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, of this famous kind
(33:25):
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
(33:46):
to collapse into a black hole or go 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, it's
gravity can suck in some of the mater curial from
that other star and that can trigger a supernova. Now
it has enough gravity to collapse, and Type one A
(34:07):
supernova is the one that tell us about dark energy
and 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 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. So Type one A are these very
(34:28):
special conditions from a binary star system with a white
dwarf that gobbles energy and mass from its partner to
trigger the supernova. So we wouldn't have those without binary
star systems, so 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
(34:48):
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 hands with brothers blows up, sorry
giving a ra in public and people ful filled it
with the cell phone, then it's all over for the
whole family. I just meant their career blows up, you know,
like one of them becomes Thor and the other ones,
you know, whatever they're doing, they're not Thor, they're not Thor.
(35:11):
I think that's how their parents now call them. This
is my son Thor, which is my other son, not Thor.
And this is my other son Awsome, not Thor. Hey,
if one of my siblings was a god on screen,
and then yes, I would define myself. Is not that one?
If one of your siblings, I see, well, I'm sure
they're happy not to be you as well. Everybody in
(35:34):
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 sism. You can you have three
or four or five or maybe even more than that.
But first, let's take another quick break. All right, we're
(36:00):
talking about multi star 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 systems 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.
(36:23):
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 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've
got three stars in orbit around their common center of mass.
(36:44):
So that's a triple system. And why not, right, I mean,
they're consensing cosmological objects, you know, to each their own
that's right. I believe in polly star systems or whatever
you thought it, Polly physics. There you go. We're open
minded here on the podcast. I think what you mean
is like haveing a system kind of like ours, where
there's a big there's something in the middle that's big
and happening, and then there's maybe like a third one
(37:06):
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 into 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 are
like all whizzing around each other in close quarters in
(37:28):
some crazy like dance. 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 preference checking them out.
There's a close friend, a camry couple, a close friends
Uncle George, we'll just call him uncle George, exactly. And
that's the recipe for building these more complex star systems
(37:48):
and having them be stable. For example, if you want
a quadruple star system, and there is one, it's called
Alpha Jeminorum. 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
(38:11):
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 in a period of years,
(38:32):
and in other star systems it can be hundreds or
thousands of years for the larger set. I mean, it's
it's not like our solar system. It's more like you know,
like a Meani galaxy almost, yes, sort of. But they
are definitely orbiting each other. They are gravitationally bound to
each other, you know, the way like the Orc cloud
is really really far out there, but it's still gravitationally
(38:52):
bound to our Sun, and so it's part of our
solar system. I see. So that's a system we actually
know about what we can see it. 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
(39:14):
based on these spectroscopic measurements, the measuring of light and
seeing the Doppler shift. Well, 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 triinary. Let's check out the other one
that's binary. And then it turns into an eight solar
sun system. And yeah, you never know, you never know. Well,
(39:35):
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 out the edge of
the other one. You have like a binary star system.
But then it turns out that one of them looks
(39:57):
like a binary star, right, so you have instead of
a binary star system, now you have a trinary. Then
you zoom in on one of those in the binary,
and turns out that's a binary. And then you zoom
in on one of those in that binary, and that
turns out to be a binary. 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
(40:19):
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 S E. You need
like a hierarchy, But is that hierarchy due to the
size like each as you go down a level, the
sun's get smaller. Are they all the same size? It
just happened to like be trapped in this hierarchical orbits.
(40:42):
They don't have to be smaller. They can be large,
and 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 then 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
(41:03):
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 gonna 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,
(41:23):
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
(41:46):
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 Sementi swinging party in space. Yeah, and I
(42:09):
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 so chaotic, right, there's so much gravity all
the time that would be pretty hard to find a
stable orbit. Like, it's amazing that even these found a
stable orbit, right, I guess how did they find that orbit?
Did they? Do you think they were born, you know,
near each other and that's just what they settled into.
(42:29):
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 not a hyperbolic trajectory. And if it
unless it loses energy somehow, it's just gonna whizz around
(42:51):
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 cloud. It
just happened to form six points there that gobble up
a lot of the mass and then coalesced into this
(43:11):
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
(43:34):
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 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 eyeline. Yeah,
And so this was discovered by a test, which is
this awesome telescope that looks for exoplanets via this transit
(43:55):
method of dimming of the light of a star to
see something passing in front of it. And so we
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, but
the furthest pair, like the quad system that's orbiting around
(44:18):
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
aspire 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
(44:40):
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. It's five 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
(45:00):
there than we are. I think with each start there's
just more drama. You know, that's soap operated 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 has three,
and those two systems orbit each other. But it's really cool,
hierarchic goal. It's hard to describe over the radio, so
(45:21):
I suggest you google it. But it's 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,
(45:43):
that sounds pretty exciting. Imagine having seven parents, that's gonna
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, which mommy mom said
that I can have a treat. The majority of my
mom said I never treat, all right, well, I give
the universe, you're right, a lot of stars for being
(46:06):
so awesome and unpredictable. I mean, who would have thought
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 thought we've learned about
the universe from last thousand years, assumptions that were at
the bedrock of our understanding, should be questioned because they
(46:27):
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 said in 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 or wherever you're listening to this podcast,
and tell your friends thanks for joining us. See you
(46:49):
next time. Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel and
joor Hicks Blame the Universe is a production of I
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