Our Part of the Galaxy is Packed with Binary Stars

Seldom Bucket

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Binary star systems are everywhere. They make up a huge percentage of all known solar systems: from what we can tell, about half of all Sun-like stars have a binary partner. But we haven’t really had a chance to study them in detail yet. That’s about to change. Using data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia spacecraft, a research team has just compiled a gigantic new catalog of nearby binary star systems, and it shows that at least 1.3 million of them exist within 3000 light-years of Earth.


This detailed survey of our local galactic neighborhood offers an enormous sample of binary stars for researchers to dig into. Previous surveys of binary stars, like the Tycho and Hipparcos catalogs (which were compiled between 1997 and 2002), only found around 13,000 paired stars. The new Gaia survey sample size is 100 times larger, which will allow astronomers to make far more accurate models of star system formation.

 
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