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Amazing. If we ever find stars orbiting like that, I might start believing in intelligent design. Imagine living on a planet in the 7-butterfly pattern. Twice
by arnarbi 13y ago
Amazing. If we ever find stars orbiting like that, I might start believing in intelligent design.
Imagine living on a planet in the 7-butterfly pattern. Twice a year (or whatever) you'd see the other planets heading straight for you as you whizz through the apex in the middle.
- ChuckMcM 13y agoOne could argue that given the number of stars out there, there must be some in fairly interesting orbits. I was trying to figure out what these would look like edge on if we were observing them from earth. In some scenarios (like the box) they would look kind of like a binary star system where the spectrum of the stars changed periodically (depending in which of the stars were in 'front' toward our point of view)
- splat 13y agoIt's still unknown whether or not these orbits are stable. It seems probable that they're unstable, in which case you would never expect to find them in the universe.
- leephillips 13y agoThey're probably all unstable except for the figure-8. Numerical experiments suggest that there should be somewhere from one to 100 figure-8 systems in the observable universe: http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/N-body_choreographies http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/N-body_choreographies
- lholden 13y agoAlso worth noting that the mass of each star involved in a figure-8 would have to be pretty much identical.
- leephillips 13y agoAll these solutions are for bodies of equal mass.
- lholden 13y agoA pretty idea, but planetary orbits in a multi star system are pretty hard. You either have to orbit in close enough to one of the stars that the other star doesn't destabilize your orbit, or you have to orbit far enough out that you orbit the center of mass for all of the stars involved. As a side note... While not quite the same we have observed some pretty cool orbits around the super massive black hole at the center of our galaxy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Galactic_centre_orbits.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Galactic_centre_orbits.sv... (I doubt any of those stars have planets either. Each time they go wizzing by each other or the black hole the planets would be flung off. Pretty chaotic mess in there :D)