Would the combined heat and radiation from binary stars mean that habitable planets would have to have a VERY large orbital radius?
There are stable orbits for planets in binary star systems. There are various stability criteria which say when an orbit is stable. One such criteria (and I don’t know the actual numbers) says that if all orbits are circular and the stars are the same size, then the planet must orbit one of them at less than /some fraction/ of the inter-star distance, or must orbit both combined at more than /whatever/ times the inter-star distance. Figure-eight orbits are unstable, and can eject the planet from the system. If you have two Sun-like stars at the center of the system, a planet would be the same temperature as Earth if it were at sqrt(2) = 1.4 astronomical units away, rather than Earth’s 1 AU. This distance is closer than Mars’s orbit (1.6 AU). Most stars are dimmer than our Sun, so the orbit could be even smaller. The high energy astronomers at NASA don’t know much about this subject, so we asked an expert: Eric Mamajek of Pennsylvania State University: The solar-like stars 16 Cygni B an
There are stable orbits for planets in binary star systems. There are various stability criteria which say when an orbit is stable. One such criteria (and I don’t know the actual numbers) says that if all orbits are circular and the stars are the same size, then the planet must orbit one of them at less than /some fraction/ of the inter-star distance, or must orbit both combined at more than /whatever/ times the inter-star distance. Figure-eight orbits are unstable, and can eject the planet from the system. If you have two Sun-like stars at the center of the system, a planet would be the same temperature as Earth if it were at sqrt(2) = 1.4 astronomical units away, rather than Earth’s 1 AU. This distance is closer than Mars’s orbit (1.6 AU). Most stars are dimmer than our Sun, so the orbit could be even smaller. The high energy astronomers at NASA don’t know much about this subject, so we asked an expert: Eric Mamajek of Pennsylvania State University: The solar-like stars 16 Cygni B an
