Slashdot Mirror
Most Stars Are Single
An anonymous reader writes to tell us Space.com is reporting that 'for more than 200 years, astronomers thought that most of the stars in our galaxy had stellar companions. But a new study suggests the bulk of them are born alone and never have stellar company.' The key difference seems to come from the difference between the highly turbulent clouds that produce massive stars in groups and the less active smaller clouds that produce red dwarfs."
I bet these lonely stars spend most of their time hanging around myspace.com.
Uncensored Google results requested and delivered by email
What? RTFA? Huh, you're new here.
Anyway, where was I, oh yeah, Stars and their divorce rate...
...how often we have to unlearn what we've been taught for so long by scientists. This has been one of the more basic tenets of astronomy, something almost always mentioned when discussing extrasolar planets at any length. And now we're being told that two hundred years of teaching was wrong?
The longer I live, the less enamored I am with science. I was always taught that it's this great infallible thing, that science only knows fact. This is a prime example of just how wrong science can be. I suppose I'm just going to have to become a creationist now, at least they never change their stories.
(that last part was a joke)
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
So does this mean that the big two-for-one sale at http://www.starregistry.com/ will have to be rethought?
Some bring out the best in others, some the worst. Some bring out far more.
"Most slashdot users as well..."
We all realized how far down in quality Slashdot has sunk when the first thought on everyone's mind when they saw this title was, "I can think of way more married stars than single ones."
In astronomy class 4 years ago I learned that most solar systems were binary or more complex, so this is very interesting news indeed. I wonder if this improves the chances of more solar systems having planetary companions, since I'd think it less likely for binary or trinary systems to have planets since more matter in the system is taken up in star mass.
This might also increase the calculable possibility for habitible planets in our galzaxy too.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
And here I thought I was going to learn how I might have a shot at Kate Beckinsale or Lucy Liu, but instead it's only some lame story about astronomy. Thanks for getting my hopes up once again slashdot!!!
sheesh!
While the results of the star survey do not disprove the nemesis theory, they do seem to lessen the chance of it being correct. With red dwarves being being the most likely suspect for nemesis (see http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/solarsystem/ nemesis_010320-1.html/
and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemesis_(star)/) and at the same time not likely to be a companion star, I guess they'll have to look for different astrological suspects.
Then again, I could be wrong.
The article goes on to explain that red dwarfs (tiny stars, much smaller than the sun) are much more common that sun-like and larger stars, and that red dwarfs are much less likely to be binaries. So, in total stars are more likely to be single.
However, from my reading it seems that the conventional wisdom that most sun-like stars are binaries is still true. I once learned the humorous mnemonic "Three out of every two stars is a binary".
For those who care about the background, the binary frequency has been shown pretty clearly to depend on mass. Solar-mass stars have binary frequencies of at least 60%, stars of 0.5 solar masses have binary frequencies of ~35%, and very low-mass stars and brown dwarfs (under 0.2 solar masses) have binary frequencies of around 10-20%. The binary frequency among more massive stars appears to be even higher than for solar-mass stars.
The popular reason to care about binary frequencies is to determine the frequency with which planetary systems could occur. If you're interested in habitable planets around solar-type stars, the higher binary frequency is one to care about. The frequency with which planets could form around lower-mass stars is intrinsically interesting since they're so common, but they're also much harder to detect any of these planets using existing indirect methods, so it's a harder question to actually answer. Once we have the ability to directly image planets, the problem will invert itself since it's easier to see planetary companions to faint stars than bright stars.
Microsoft delenda est!
Holly: Look, we're travelling faster than the speed of light. That means, by the time we see something, we've already passed through it. Even with an IQ of 6000, it's still brown trousers time.