A star is not alone

A star is not alone. At least 3/4^th of them aren’t. They have companions. Take Castor for example, in the constellation of Taurus. It is made of SIX stars! Three pairs of revolving binaries, and they are separable only by a spectroscope - by differentiating between their individual spectra. It will be amazing to travel to such a star system. Just imagine watching six stars revolving around each other – well it is not that simple, but the view would be breathtaking!

Paired stars are not uncommon, it’s the loners like our Sun that are. One of the early theories about the extinction of dinosaurs assumed that the Sun had a companion. It was the proximity of that other star, during one of its revolutions that produced imbalance in the Earth’s ecosystem, resulting in the destruction of the giant reptiles. If so, that buddy star should have been found by now, and its orbit determined.

Another exciting phenomenon occurs when one of the stars dies and becomes a black hole – you have a scene where one star is revolving around nothing, since the black hole will only be visible in x-ray or infrared wavelengths!