In the Milky Way, half of the stars have a traveling companion with whom they form a binary system . There are even those that form stellar "trios". Why then are there so many lonely stars? Scientists at the University of Bonn and the Max-Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Germany have concluded that stars are normally born two at a time within clouds of gas and dust , and that those traveling alone lost somewhere moment to his companion.
Specifically, Michael Marks and his colleagues suggest that sometimes the gravitational interaction with other stars within the "stellar nursery" in which they are born causes "couples to split into two individual stars, in the same way that a pair of dancers she could be separated by colliding with another couple on a crowded dance floor. " In this way, many stars cease to be binary before beginning their journey through the galaxy. The more stars are formed in a small space (denser groups), the more interaction there will be with other stars and, therefore, the greater the probability of losing your partner.
The researchers, publishing their results in the latest issue of the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society , have developed a computer model to calculate the composition of stars and binary stars in different regions of space as a function of density. "For the first time we can calculate how many stars there are in a galaxy and what type they are, " they say.
