Are most of the Milky Way's stars solitary?
Seventy-five percent of known stars are red dwarfs, and this artist's rendering shows what one might look like in high resolution. Unlike other stars, which often exist as part of a binary pair or an even larger system, most red dwarfs lead a solitary existence. (NASA)
Here’s news about double stars that you won’t find in any astronomy textbook…
And that’s because it represents a complete reversal in thinking on the subject. The idea is that most stars may be solitary, after all. Consider our sun. It’s a single star, accompanied only by orbiting planets, asteroids, comets and dust. But many stars reside in double or triple star systems. For example, the very nearest star system to the sun – Alpha Centauri – is triple.
Former studies of bright, easy-to-see stars indicated that most of them lie in multiple systems, unlike our sun. The sun was thought to be unusual in being so solitary. But according to astronomer Charles Lada at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, there’s a problem with those earlier studies. They neglected small, faint stars known as red dwarfs.
Astronomers have come to recognize that most red dwarfs are solitary. And most stars are red dwarfs – three-fourths of all stars, in fact. Charles Lada worked out the numbers, including red dwarfs in the earlier studies of double and triple systems. He concludes that two thirds of all star systems are single.
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Man’s drive for “special status” in the universe clouds our daily judgment. Once we begin to realize it’s all special – each other included and all that surrounds us – even the most mundane – we’ll reach the beginnings of our real potential.
That’s a beautiful way of thinking about it, Paul! I agree with you.