Additional reading from www.astronomynotes.com [1]
Stars do not form in isolation. When clumps of gas in a GMC begin to collapse, the clumps usually fragment into smaller clumps, each of which forms a star. After the formation process ends, many stars wind up gravitationally bound to one or more partner stars. The fraction of stars that are found in multiple star systems is actually a difficult measurement to make, but the fractions are likely higher than you might expect. For massive stars, we think a large fraction may be in multiple systems—for Sun-like stars it may be about half of all stars, and for low mass stars, less than half.
For example, take some famous bright stars in the sky: Albireo (we saw an image of Albireo [4] in Lesson 4) appears in a telescope to be a pair of stars. The brightest star in the winter sky, Sirius, also has a companion (an X-ray image of the Sirius pair [5] is available at Astronomy Picture of the Day). Also, there is a star in the handle of the Big Dipper known as Mizar, which can be resolved into a double star, too.
There are a number of "visual binary" stars that you can observe with small telescopes or with Starry Night. Using the "find" feature on Starry Night, search for the stars listed below. You may have to vary the date and time so they are visible at night. Once you have them centered in your field of view, use the zoom feature to zoom in to see how they would appear magnified through a telescope. Also, read the descriptions that pop up when you mouse over them.
Stars classified as visual binaries are rare examples of stars that are close enough to the Earth that in images we can directly observe that they have a companion. In most cases, however, stars are so far away and their companions are so close that images taken by even the most powerful telescopes in the world cannot tell if there is one star or two present. However, we have observational methods to determine if a star is in a binary system even if an image appears to show only one point of light. Three of these techniques are:
Binary stars are very useful tools in the study of the properties of stars. In the previous lesson, we discussed that we can measure a star's luminosity, distance, and velocity, but we did not discuss any methods for measuring the mass or radius of a star. You might be curious how those properties correlate with the other properties we did discuss, like luminosity, for example. Our knowledge of the masses and radii of stars comes mostly from the study of stars in binary systems. For example, we can use Kepler's third law to derive the masses of the stars in a binary system. Recall that when two objects orbit each other the following equation applies:
If we measure the separation between the objects (a) and the period of their orbit (P), we can calculate their masses. Unfortunately, depending on the type of binary (e.g., spectroscopic, eclipsing, astrometric), we are often unable to directly measure its orbital properties unambiguously. Since the inclination angle of a binary star's orbit with our line of sight (that is, is it edge-on, face-on, or somewhere in between?) is often unknown or only able to be estimated, in many cases what you measure is not the mass of the star, but the mass times sin (i) where i is the inclination angle of the orbit. Thus, you get a limit on the mass, but not the true value. If you have a spectroscopic binary that is also eclipsing, you can measure the velocities, period, separation, and inclination angle, because you know that the orbital plane has to be edge-on or nearly edge-on for us to witness eclipses from Earth. Thus, it is these systems that really help us measure stellar masses quite accurately.
Eclipsing binaries also provide us with a tool for measuring the radius of a star. In the following animation (:29), you can watch the binary stars orbit their center of mass several times.
In the next animation (:33), the inclination of the orbit with respect to the viewer (you) has been set to 85 degrees, and the orbital eccentricity has been set to 0.0.
Note the stars' orientation to each other at the beginning of the deep eclipse and at the end of the deep eclipse.
In the interests of time and space, I am skipping the details of making the calculations of stellar mass and stellar radii using binary systems, but you can read about these topics in more detail in the online astronomy textbook Astronomy Notes:
Links
[1] http://www.astronomynotes.com
[2] http://www.astronomynotes.com/starprop/s10.htm
[3] http://www.astronomynotes.com/starprop/s11.htm
[4] http://astron.berkeley.edu/%7Ebait/calstar/bear1.html
[5] http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap001006.html
[6] http://www.astronomy.ohio-state.edu/~pogge/Ast162/Movies/specbin.html
[7] http://www.astronomy.ohio-state.edu/~pogge/Ast162/Movies/eclbin.html