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Binary star. The well-known binary star Sirius, seen here in a Hubble photograph from 2005, with Sirius A in the center, and white dwarf, Sirius B, to the left bottom from it. A binary star or binary star system is a system of two stars that are gravitationally bound to and in orbit around each other. Binary stars in the night sky that are seen ...
A binary system is a system of two astronomical bodies of the same kind that are comparable in size. Definitions vary, but typically require the center of mass to be located outside of either object. (See animated examples.) The most common kinds of binary system are binary stars and binary asteroids, but brown dwarfs, planets, neutron stars ...
Sirius is a binary star system consisting of two white stars orbiting each other with a separation of about 20 AU [e] (roughly the distance between the Sun and Uranus) and a period of 50.1 years. The brighter component, termed Sirius A, is a main-sequence star of spectral type early A , with an estimated surface temperature of 9,940 K . [ 14 ]
A circumbinary planet is a planet that orbits two stars instead of one. The two stars orbit each other in a binary system, while the planet typically orbits farther from the center of the system than either of the two stars. In contrast, circumstellar planets in a binary system have stable orbits around one of the two stars, [1] closer in than ...
Procyon is a binary star system with a bright primary component, Procyon A, having an apparent magnitude of 0.34, [3] and a faint companion, Procyon B, at magnitude 10.7. [4] The pair orbit each other with a period of 40.84 years along an elliptical orbit with an eccentricity of 0.4, [ 13 ] more eccentric than Mercury 's.
For example, the stars Gliese 644A and Gliese 644B form what appears to be a close visual binary star; because Gliese 644B is a spectroscopic binary, this is actually a triple system. The triple system has the more distant visual companion Gliese 643 and the still more distant visual companion Gliese 644C, which, because of their common motion ...
An example of a visual binary: Theta1 Orionis C1 (lower) and C2 (upper), as imaged by VLT/GRAVITY. A visual binary is a gravitationally bound binary star system [1] that can be resolved into two stars. These stars are estimated, via Kepler's third law, to have periods ranging from a few years to thousands of years. A visual binary consists of ...
Double planet. In astronomy, a double planet (also binary planet) is a binary satellite system where both objects are planets, or planetary-mass objects, and whose joint barycenter is external to both planetary bodies. Although up to a third of the star systems in the Milky Way are binary, [1] double planets are expected to be much rarer given ...