For habitability, two stars are not better than one
Nothing is easy when you have two stars instead of one. Under the right circumstances, it can be especially hard to hold on to your atmosphere.
Seeing Double: Binary stars in dwarf galaxies
Two (stars) aren’t always better than one, especially when you’re trying to track down dark matter in tiny galaxies.
Getting distances from stars that touch
Contact binaries are stars so close together that they touch…and that might be enough for us to know how far away they are.
Capella’s Secrets
While you might expect astronomers to already have a complete understanding of bright stars easily visible to the naked eye like Capella, observations have historically failed to line up with stellar evolution theories. Today’s paper revisits Capella with a new suite of observations to finally uncover some of its secrets.
A Cepheid Pulsator in an Eccentric Binary
Cepheids’ pulsing brightness variations happen because the star’s temperature and radius is changing, and they occupy a unique niche of stellar evolution. We can learn a lot about what is physically happening inside stars during this tumultuous time through close observations. Or rather, we could learn a lot about what happens inside Cepheid variable stars, if only we knew their masses.
Wreaking Havoc with a Stellar Fly-By
You can’t model RW Aurigae as a single star with a disk of material around it, because there is a second star. And you can’t model it as a regular old binary system either, because there are interactions between the stars and the asymmetric disk. The authors of today’s paper create a comprehensive hydrodynamic model that considers many different observations of RW Aurigae.