Our Lonely Star
When you look up at the stars at night you could be forgiven for thinking that they are all single points of light. But on closer inspection it has emerged that the majority of stars are twins or even triple star clusters.
Our Sun seems to be in the minority when it comes to neighbours. Our nearest neighbour is actually a group of three stars known as the Alpha Centauri system all orbiting around each other in a celestial dance. The closest of the three is called Proxima Centauri at a distance of 4.2 light years away or 24,690,226,567,371 miles. A very long way off indeed!
Alpha Centauri’s two neighbouring sisters Alpha Centauri A and Alpha Centauri B are just a little further away at 4.3 light years distance and are located in the southern hemisphere so are never visible from Spain. In fact there are only 11 stars within 10 light years of Earth and out of these 11 closest stars only three of them are visible to the naked eye, the others are too faint to be seen without a telescope.
So it would appear that we live in quite a secluded area of our galaxy.
The brightest star in the night sky is called Sirius and is visible at this time of year – just follow the three stars in Orion’s belt down to the left and you will find Sirius. Sirius is one of our neighbours at 8.7 light years away. But Sirius too is a double star with a very faint companion star orbiting around it. The 9th and 10th closest stars are also a double star at 8.9 light years away but again these two stars are too faint to be seen without a telescope.
If you have very good eyesight then there are a few double stars that can be seen with the naked eye. Look for the constellation of The Plough. This is the one that looks a lot like a giant saucepan. Now look very carefully at the middle star of the three stars that form the ‘handle’ of the saucepan and you will see that it has a very faint companion very close by. With a telescope you will find that this faint star also has another companion star with it forming a nice little trio of stars.
Stars can also come in tight clusters containing many hundreds of stars all grouped closely together. If you live in a very dark area then look directly overhead at this time of the year and you may be able to make out a faint misty smudge – it’s better with binoculars, this is a double cluster in the constellation of Perseus. Each cluster contains thousands of stars about 7000 light years away from us and just visible to the naked eye.
We could have had a double star though. During the formation of the early solar system if the gases that formed Jupiter had joined with the gases of Saturn to produce one huge planet instead of two then it is possible that Jupiter would have been big enough to form into a star.
It must be a very strange sight to live on a planet with two suns in the sky. Do you remember that scene from Star Wars where Luke Skywalker went out into the desert looking for the robots R2D2 and C3PO? There were two suns in the sky of his home planet of Tatooine (see the picture above).
When it comes to planets orbiting around stars it is beginning to look like almost every star has at least one planet in its own solar system. New planets are being discovered almost daily and the belief now is that there are at least as many planets as there are stars. It’s just a matter of time before astronomers discover the ‘Goldilocks’ planet – not too big or too small, not too hot and not too cold, just right to support life. Then perhaps there really will be a Luke Skywalker living in a galaxy far, far away and out searching for his droids!
By Ken Campbell
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