Question about the 'sirius' star?
Asked by
ah020387 (
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December 9th, 2010
With regard to the star ‘sirius’ is it accompanied by seven moons or seven other stars?
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8 Answers
There are apparently two stars called Sirius, Sirius A and Sirius B. They form a binary system together. So each Sirius is accompanied by one other star.
I don’t know if it’s known at all what planets there are in the Sirius system.
At any rate, moons are things that orbit a planet or something smaller, so a sun can’t have moons by definition. It wouldn’t be called a moon, it would be called something else.
The system is an orbiting visual binary. Round and round they go.
Binary stars
Sirius is close enough to Earth that if it had any planets, we would certainly know about them using the methods for locating exoplanets. It is a binary system, and because of its proximity, both of the stars are visible with a powerful telescope like Hubble.
One of the holy grails of astrophotography is to actually separate the images of Sirius A and Sirius B. It’s been done, but I’m not sure if it’s been done by any amateur astronomers. Here is a Chandra picture
I think that the Chandra image is it…^^@BarnacleBill found the same one but with some text.
Is that B at about 8:45 or is my screen dirty?
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