Discussion Main / BinarySuns

I feel like this should be renamed to Multiple Suns since many of the examples have more than two.

There definitely needs to be at least one additional variant — again, see 2010 as an example. Sure, from Earth what's observed is a Type I Ia, with Lucifer (formerly Jupiter) sometimes in the same part of the sky as Sol and sometimes in opposition. But there are also people living on Ganymede, which orbits Lucifer. The situation for them is similar, and yet different from that described in Type II.

Another example of the same thing is in Catherine Asaro's The Radiant Seas, where Prism orbits Red (a red dwarf star), which in turn orbits Blue (a blue giant).

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.