Imagine that you live on a distant planet in the Alpha Centauri star system and you have decided to spend the evening watching the suns set. Yes, I said suns. It is late in the evening and the twin suns that dominate your sky are slowly making their way toward the horizon. Your face catches a gentle rush of wind as Centauri A and Centauri B begin to disappear behind the curve of your home world. The enchanting spectacle is short lived, but extremely common among worlds orbiting G-class stars. The two suns disappear beneath the horizon and ultimately give way to a sea of glistening stars. One of those stars…is our home…

That star, our Sun, is an unbound G-class star—a lonely outcast. Fortunately it did not take years of psychotherapy and a library of self-help books for astronomers to realize it. Observations of distant star systems such as Alpha Centauri have helped us understand that most G-class stars are binary—meaning that they are part of an orbiting pair—each star orbits the other just as the planets in our solar system orbit the Sun. Centauri A and Centauri B are gravitationally linked to each other just as are a majority of the G-class stars in our galaxy. Why are we so special? Where is our companion star? Unfortunately, we do not have one. Our Sun is alone and this is a very valuable thing for us to understand.

Astronomers used to believe that a majority of stars were gravitationally linked. That line of thinking has changed in the last few years as we have learned that over half of the stars in our own galaxy are not gravitationally bound to other stars. That is because a majority of those are stars M-class which tend to be less massive than our own. The stars with higher masses such as our Sun often form in darker clouds of matter where it is theorized that their cores are more susceptible to fragmentation. A prime example of a star formation region where this may take place is the Eagle Nebula. Imagine a new, high-mass star has formed inside the nebula but its core is unstable and fragments during formation. The two fragments then gather enough matter between the two of them to form separate, but gravitationally bound stars.

Another theory is that all stars are born as binary systems and are torn apart after their formation. This could be from passing too close to a black hole or being caught in the gravitational pull of other stars. Whatever the answer is, the fact remains that our star is unique among its G-class brothers and the fact that it is a single system adds another item to the list of reasons that our place in the universe is precious.

Some interesting facts…

- 70% of stars are single star systems/30% are multiple star systems
- G-class stars (i.e. our Sun) only make up 7% of our galactic star catalogue

There are many fascinating regions of space that are forming new stars. These can be seen with a small to moderate sized telescope. Two of the most visible are The Great Nebula in Orion (Messier 42) and The Eagle Nebula (Messier 16).

Himiko Lyman-Alpha Blob | Image Credit: M. Ouchi, et al

Scientists have discovered a strange object which may be the most massive “blob” of matter remaining from the early development of our universe. The object is called Himiko and appears to Earth-based astronomers as a giant glob of matter about 12.9 billion light years away. How big is it you may ask? Well, Himiko is about 55,000 light years across or roughly half the diameter of the Milky Way Galaxy. It may not seem like a significant size when we consider the prevalence of supermassive black holes and giant, colliding galaxies in our own local neighborhood, but that’s pretty big for something from the Big Bang era. Astronomers have several theories as to what Himiko is, exactly. Some theorize that it’s ionized gas around a supermassive black hole while others believe it’s a gigantic primordial galaxy. Me? I’m hoping we’ve found the Death Star.

Distant mystery objects have always fascinated me, because anytime we look through a telescope at an object like Himiko, we’re literally looking into the past. Light travels roughly 6.5 trillion miles in a year, and just as humans must drive or walk from one point to another to get somewhere, light must travel from one point to another so that we can observe it. The light from a star like Sirius or primordial galactic candidate such as Himiko must travel across the vast, empty vacuum of outer space to our little world so that human eyes can intercept and interpret it. Now, here comes the cool part. Himiko is 12.9 BILLION light years away. That means that the light these astronomers are seeing when they study Himiko began travelling to Earth some 12.9 billion years ago! That’s a long, long time considering that there was NO Earth at that point in the development of the universe!