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New Evidence That All Stars Are Born in Pairs

cfa.harvard.edu

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Re: New Evidence That All Stars Are Born in Pairs

#21

Post by return0 »

gitpusher wrote: post #10
sideshowb wrote: post #9

I read that as Paris. On the plus side it makes more sense now. Should probably go to sleep...

I also read Paris, and thought "stars" referred to celebrities. Oops

Me too, and i think we discovered a new phenomenon.

OK i ll rationalize it, stars aren't "Born" , humans are. "A star is born" is a common phrase, and doesn't usually refer to stellar objects. Since i was tricked to believe it was talking about humans, it;s easier to understand how i might have confused pairs for Paris (which was also capitalized). Plus i dont wear my glasses.

Re: New Evidence That All Stars Are Born in Pairs

#22

Post by ryanar »

aeleos wrote: post #13
gitpusher wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also read Paris, and thought "stars" referred to celebrities. Oops

That is literally the exact thing that I thought too. Its interesting that a sentence like this can be so easily misinterpreted by multiple people in the same way.

The brain has multiple indicators for this misinterpretation. Stars early on in this sentence, narrows down context, Born in makes us even further think of a human star aka celeb, Pairs is capitlized, making us think it is a proper noun, the brain also doesnt read the middle letters of words if you remember that word jumbled experiment where you can still read it. All of this combines together to make the brain on first glance say Paris and not pairs

Re: New Evidence That All Stars Are Born in Pairs

#24

Post by theoh »

jansho wrote: post #20
ngoldbaum wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is silly semantics. Jupiter and the Sun both orbit the center of mass of the Jupiter-Sun system. The article is making the point that for Jupiter and the Sun this point happens to be just outside the surface of the Sun. It's much simpler to say "Jupiter orbits the Sun" than "Jupiter and the Sun both orbit the center of mass of the Jupiter-Sun system". You can think of the former as a shorthand for the latter.

But doesn't this show that the main players of the solar system are the sun and Jupiter? Apologies for the source, and my clear lack of knowledge in astronomy.

All planets orbit the centre of mass of themselves and the local star, modulo interactions with other planets. The position of the centre of mass relative to the surface of the star is completely immaterial.

NB for smaller bodies, Jupiter is involved in perturbing or capturing their orbits to a great extent -- but we could conceivably have several very large planets contributing to that dynamic. Yes, Jupiter is the largest planet.

Re: New Evidence That All Stars Are Born in Pairs

#25

Post by fwefwwfe »

jansho wrote: post #20
ngoldbaum wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is silly semantics. Jupiter and the Sun both orbit the center of mass of the Jupiter-Sun system. The article is making the point that for Jupiter and the Sun this point happens to be just outside the surface of the Sun. It's much simpler to say "Jupiter orbits the Sun" than "Jupiter and the Sun both orbit the center of mass of the Jupiter-Sun system". You can think of the former as a shorthand for the latter.

But doesn't this show that the main players of the solar system are the sun and Jupiter? Apologies for the source, and my clear lack of knowledge in astronomy.

They are the two most massive, so that is tautologically true...

Re: New Evidence That All Stars Are Born in Pairs

#29

Post by umeshunni »

acd wrote: post #28

If all stars are born in pairs where is our suns sister sun and earths sibling planet?

From the article:

Based on this model, the Sun's sibling most likely escaped and mixed with all the other stars in our region of the Milky Way galaxy, never to be seen again.

Re: New Evidence That All Stars Are Born in Pairs

#30

Post by twic »

> Many stars have companions

Most stars.

Many years ago, i downloaded a copy of the Gliese star catalogue, and set about generating some star charts of nearby space in VRML (which should give you some idea of just how many years ago that was). Multiple stars are listed as multiple entries in the catalogue, and i realised that if i drew markers for each one, they'd overlap and look terrible. Never mind, i thought, there will only be a few of them, and that's alright for a first version.

Not so! The majority of stars were in multiple systems (although the majority of systems are not multiple), and the chart looked even more shonky than i had anticipated. I had to go back and tweak my generator to merge multiple stars into single entries.

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