Page 22 of To the Moon and Back
STEPH BINARY STAR
Freshman Fall
Binary stars are two stars, orbiting a common center of mass. In a binary star system, the brighter star is classified as primary. The two are referred to as A and B. In cases of equal brightness, the discoverer will designate them and that will be honored: A and B.
The astronomy class was called Exploring the Universe, and before school started, I’d imagined it to be something like a biweekly field trip to a planetarium.
I thought I would lie back in a dark room, look at images of planets and stars and galaxies, and have it all explained to me.
Maybe from the very beginning? Like a realtor, come to walk me through a house I’d been living in all my life.
Exploring the Universe was a disappointment.
It was hard. It was cold, almost brutal in its lack of poetry.
Two hundred students in stadium seating.
A professor with a beige-colored microphone taped to his cheek like the worst Broadway show in the world, shouting out numbers and equations related to lenses and light and color, and so fucking much about telescopes! We never got to look inside one.
For the second time in my life, I was beginning to doubt my career plans.
I wished I’d taken something in earth sciences or biology.
Animal Behavior, or Natural Disasters and Catastrophes—both real classes that might let me touch something with my hands.
In Exploring the Universe, I sat in the second row and squeezed my fingers into a fist. Anchoring myself, holding on.
I spent more time than I thought I would worrying about my sister.
Was she getting to school on time without my alarm clock?
Was she keeping up her grades? Brett’s affair, and the eyes it put on our family, had been hard on her.
By the time I moved out, Kayla’s paintings had gotten so, so dumb, like Plains-inspired Indian girls petting neon coyotes in the moonlight.
Also, I knew she spent too much time with older boys.
I worried that, without me there, she’d only become more careless.
Then, binary stars.
The professor was at a conference at UC Berkeley. He’d left a TA to teach in his place, a postdoc from India. She left the beige microphone on the long table at the front of the room and spoke in an almost-shout. I let go of my hands and listened.
Binary stars , she said, were first observed in 1650! By Giovanni Battista Riccioli!
The TA talked like that for an hour and a half.
Her language was clear, clipped. Direct.
She paced back and forth at the front of the room, moving her arms to demonstrate relative size and orbit.
At one point, she even spun around. She was a planet, rotating and revolving around two stars.
Star A was the podium. Star B was a heeled boot, which she had kicked off her foot mid-sentence, and she now moved around the room seriously, hobbling with great purpose.
The TA explained how binary stars form. Most often, the same pocket of dust and gas will fall into itself to form one star, and then split. But sometimes—though rarely—a massive star will capture a passing star.
How a pair evolves will depend on the space between them.
Wide binaries will barely affect each other.
Their orbital periods could be less than an hour, or many days, or many hundreds of thousands of years.
The farther star in a wide binary may have kicked out a third star. It may even be pushed out itself.
Close binaries can change each other’s futures—they can transfer mass between each other, altering their composition. If one star in a close binary explodes in a supernova, its companion may also be destroyed.
While my classmates hurried out of the auditorium, I waited in my seat for the TA. She gathered her papers into a leather folder. I wanted to know more—it had been our first lesson not on the instruments of study, but on what could be known.
The TA let me follow her all the way through the building, down the stairs into an underground tunnel, through the tunnel into another building, and into the little windowless office in a basement that she shared with a German man on an astrophysics fellowship.
She didn’t have a chair for visitors, so I leaned against the wall, which was gray-painted cinder block, and knocked my knuckles against it behind my back.
I tried to get my head around this dark and pitiful office as a part of the greater universe. And me, right now, a part of it, too.
I asked the TA if life could exist in a binary system, and she looked like she could hug me. She sat the wrong way around, holding the back of her chair to her chest. “I am literally trying to answer that question,” she said. “For seven years I’ve been working on it.”
On just that? I thought. I did not understand the slow march of research.
I asked for her best guess.
“I don’t think life can exist in most binary systems,” she said.
“And of course long-term planetary orbits are unlikely to be stable over the millions and billions of years that are needed for life to form. A lot of people would agree with that, so all my work is in the word ‘most.’ Trying to get the data to point toward something conclusive.”
“Unstable like, it’s too hot?” I said. “Like, double suns?”
She nodded, and I felt something fall open inside me. I had a much firmer idea now, than I’d had as a kid, of what this feeling was. How it pointed to what I was. But now I was old enough to know I had no chance with her.
“Yes,” she said. “But you could also have a habitable zone. A position with two orbiting stars where the conditions are compatible with life, and then oops , now they’ve zoomed out of the habitable zone and everything freezes!”
I laughed. My face felt hot. Did she think I could belong here, with a prestigious posting in a terrible basement office someday, like her?
If she showed me her research, could I skim my eyes down the third or fourth page of numbers and lines and boom , figure it all out?
And now she’s so grateful I did that for her, she’s running with me through the tunnels under the school and she’s holding me against a heavy oak door, her palm pressed flat under my collarbone, and she’s whispering in my neck about how smart I am?
In real life, the TA leaned over a stack of books on her desk between us, like a little wall.
She talked about a hypothetical star at either face of a hypothetical planet, killing nighttime.
“It’s total instability,” I said, echoing the point she’d just made.
She smiled patiently and nodded.
My crush on the TA was short-lived. But I promised myself I would remember that half hour with her, always.
I would look out for news on binary stars, for any discoveries that might change the way we see and understand them.
A small part of it would be for her, because I’d wonder where her life would take her after the postdoc in Connecticut.
Mostly, it was because I was sentimental. A life in science might be hard and slow and lonely—much like the promise of my time in Exploring the Universe. I wanted to stay loyal to binary stars, to stay aware at least, a kind of thank-you for how they had pulled me back in.
The TA, of course, did not hit on me that afternoon. By the next class, she’d forgotten my name.
Almost immediately I found someone else. A door opened, and I ran through it.