The Sun Tried Speed Dating Other Stars?! 💘

Original 2D space animation by Orbitimbre. Cosmic challenges, planet stories, and surprising endings. Join the Orbitimbre crew for custom emoji and loyalty badges:    / @orbitimbre   The Sun has been single for 4.6 billion years. Tonight, he has a date. The planets panic: a second star close by could stretch, scramble, or even throw their orbits away. So they launch Operation Bad Date and crash a cosmic speed-dating show: a Brown Dwarf, a Pulsar who already has three planets, a Black Hole and a White Dwarf. Every dealbreaker is a real fact about stars. Then the "perfect" Blue Supergiant walks in... and her gravity starts pulling the whole family away. Stay to the end: a real star is heading our way. Chapters: 0:00 The Sun has a date 1:05 Single for 4.6 billion years 2:09 Operation Bad Date 2:56 Speed dating the galaxy 5:13 The one 6:28 Too close 7:07 The dance 8:09 Someone's coming Science notes: The Sun is about 4.6 billion years old; sunspots come and go in a cycle of about 11 years. Nearly half of Sun-like stars have at least one companion star. Alpha Centauri A and B circle each other about every 80 years; Proxima takes roughly half a million years for one lap. Brown dwarfs have about 13 to 80 times the mass of Jupiter, too little to fuse hydrogen like the Sun. The first planets ever confirmed outside our Solar System (1992) orbit a pulsar, PSR B1257+12, which spins about 161 times a second. Close to a black hole, the near side is pulled harder than the far side: spaghettification. In about 5 billion years the Sun should swell into a red giant, then shrink into a white dwarf about the size of Earth. Blue supergiants shine tens of thousands of times brighter than the Sun and live only millions of years before many of them explode as supernovae. If one shone from where the Sun is, Earth's oceans would boil away. The "what if" scenes are thought experiments: no star like that is coming. A heavy second star nearby could reshape planetary orbits. The Sun and Jupiter both orbit a point (the barycenter) just outside the Sun's surface, so the Sun wobbles in a loop of about 12 years. Measuring that kind of wobble is one way astronomers find planets around other stars. Gliese 710 is predicted to pass about 0.05 parsec (roughly 10,600 AU) from the Sun in about 1.3 million years, about 25 times closer than Proxima is today (Gaia data). It should not disturb the planets, but scientists think it will pass through the Oort Cloud and might nudge some comets toward us. The Oort Cloud itself is inferred, not directly observed. This is a scripted cartoon: the dates, faces and personalities are fiction, and sizes and distances are not to scale. Sources: NASA: Sun Facts; Sun reaches maximum phase in 11-year solar cycle (Oct 2024); Star Types; Stars; Black Holes; Venus Facts; Saturn Facts; Jupiter Facts; Oort Cloud; Space Place, What Is a Barycenter? Raghavan et al. 2010, ApJS 190, 1 (multiplicity of Sun-like stars) Kervella et al. 2017, A&A 598, L7; Akeson et al. 2021, AJ 162, 14 (Alpha Centauri / Proxima orbit) Holman & Wiegert 1999, AJ 117, 621 (planet orbits in binary star systems) Wolszczan & Frail 1992, Nature 355, 145 (pulsar planets) Kopparapu et al. 2013, ApJ 765, 131 (habitable zone limits) de la Fuente Marcos & de la Fuente Marcos 2018, RNAAS 2, 30; Bailer-Jones et al. 2018, A&A 616, A37 (Gliese 710 encounter) EarthSky: Rigel; Do the planets revolve around the Sun? (barycenter) Music: "Meet & Fun!" (Ofshane), "Observer" (Dyalla), "Ticklish" (Quincas Moreira), "Balearic Slide" (Jeremy Black), "Outside the Universe" (Joel Cummins, Kris Myers, Andy Farag), all from the YouTube Audio Library; plus original score synthesized for this episode. Sound effects: original, synthesized for this episode. Original Orbitimbre characters and animation. #space #solarsystem #astronomy