Twin Suns Are Normal? - Learn Stuff

It`s been decades since Luke Skywalker gazed out across the desert to the twin suns on the horizon. That my seem all kinds of alien to us, but it`s actually quite normal.

Binary star systems are not news to me, I am a big `ol Star Trek nerd after all. What surprised me is that, at least in our galaxy, twin suns are actually the norm. As odd as it may seem to us, most star systems have a least two suns. The fact that we only have one is kind of weird.

There are at least five orbital patterns for a two-star setup. For instance, two stars of similar gravity could simply orbit a common center point call the barycenter. Or, one star could orbit the other like the moon to the Earth. You could even have two stars do a funky dance shaped like a figure eight.

All kinds of stars form binary systems. Sometimes one star will literally eat the other one. They did that on an episode of The Next Generation.

Binary systems can have planets just like ours does, so the scene on Tatooine is completely possible.

I`m not sure how the whole night and day thing would work out though.