Discussion History Main / BinarySuns

Current page overview is factually inaccurate: The text \\\"However, more likely than not a planet in a binary star system will be erratically slung between each sun in a spirolgraph-from-hell, ending when the planet eventually rams into one of the two suns\\\" fails physics. In such a system with planets, the most likely arrangement is that one star is more massive, and its planet(s) orbit it just as the other star does. Think about how Jupiter became a star in \\\'\\\'2010\\\'\\\'. It orbits the sun, and its mass doesn\\\'t radically change, which means that the earth\\\'s orbit is only nominally affected (if at all). I think the description needs to be updated to excise that text - or to qualify it as \\\"one rare but possible outcome\\\" rather than making it seem likely or common. If it were common, most such systems would never have formed planets in the first place.