Įvidence that stars in pairs were more than just optical alignments came in 1767 when English natural philosopher and clergyman John Michell became the first person to apply the mathematics of statistics to the study of the stars, demonstrating in a paper that many more stars occur in pairs or groups than a perfectly random distribution and chance alignment could account for. The bright southern star Acrux, in the Southern Cross, was discovered to be double by Father Fontenay in 1685. Mizar, in the Big Dipper ( Ursa Major), was observed to be double by Giovanni Battista Riccioli in 1650 (and probably earlier by Benedetto Castelli and Galileo). Binary stars are also common as the nuclei of many planetary nebulae, and are the progenitors of both novae and type Ia supernovae.ĭouble stars, a pair of stars that appear close to each other, have been observed since the invention of the telescope. Examples of binaries are Sirius, and Cygnus X-1 (Cygnus X-1 being a well-known black hole). In some cases, these close binary systems can exchange mass, which may bring their evolution to stages that single stars cannot attain. If components in binary star systems are close enough they can gravitationally distort their mutual outer stellar atmospheres. If a binary star happens to orbit in a plane along our line of sight, its components will eclipse and transit each other these pairs are called eclipsing binaries, or, together with other binaries that change brightness as they orbit, photometric binaries. They may also be detected by indirect techniques, such as spectroscopy ( spectroscopic binaries) or astrometry ( astrometric binaries).
Many visual binaries have long orbital periods of several centuries or millennia and therefore have orbits which are uncertain or poorly known. Binary stars in the night sky that are seen as a single object to the naked eye are often resolved using a telescope as separate stars, in which case they are called visual binaries. 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 itĪ binary star is a system of two stars that are gravitationally bound to and in orbit around each other.
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