3min chapter

In Our Time: Science cover image

William and Caroline Herschel

In Our Time: Science

CHAPTER

What Is a Double Star?

Herschel was looking at individual stars and trying to see if they were double stars. A double star is where you have two stars that may appear to be close together, but they are actually far apart. He found some of the er double stars were not obeying what could be explained by parallax. They seemed to have slightly different positions. And he discovered binary stars - a system with two objects relatively close to each other which interact gravitationally almost in the same way as a planet goes round the sun. Do you want to take that up? Monica?

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