Latest revision as of 06:19, 3 January 2026

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Binary Star

Title text: The discovery of a fully typographical star system comes with a big asterisk.

Explanation[edit]

Binary star systems, where two stars orbit each other, are common throughout the universe. In some cases, these are different types of stars, such as a neutron star orbiting a main sequence star. Here, however, the comic depicts a system consisting of a real celestial object (a main sequence star), and a star which has a stylised five-pointed shape in which stars are often drawn, called a pentagram.

Pointed stars do not actually exist as astronomical bodies.^{[citation needed]} Stars seen in the night sky can sometimes appear as though they have spikes coming out of them, but these are just optical illusions caused by the diffraction spike effect.

The title text puns on the * symbol (an asterisk - meaning little star), which is sometimes called a star, and is often used to indicate footnotes in text. A "big asterisk" is used as a metaphor for a rather large caveat or significant reservations about the statement being made, suggesting that such qualifications would form a long footnote. This could be interpreted as meaning that the existence of the "typographical star system" is significantly doubtful. Alternatively, it could be read as meaning that the "big asterisk" is a physically very large (astronomical scale) punctuation symbol, which forms part of a system composed of other bodies in the form of typography.

Drawing a star as a pentagram, as shown in the comic, is referenced in 1029: Drawing Stars.

The orbital paths shown are anomalous. The main sequence star follows a path that's nearly circular, while the five-pointed star follows an elliptical path, and they're at different locations along their paths. If the two stars were the most massive objects in their system by a significant margin, approximating a two-body system, their paths should be the same shape (albeit at different sizes, if their masses differ) around the shared focal-point of their barycenter and their locations along those paths should be directly in (anti-)phase. This implies that there's at least one other massive object in the system, which isn't shown. The much smaller path of the main sequence star suggests that it's in a (relatively) close orbit with the other massive object, with the five-pointed star being much less massive than either, and essentially orbiting them both at a greater distance.

Transcript[edit]

This is one of 43 incomplete transcripts:
Don't remove this notice too soon. If you can fix this issue, edit the page!

[Graphical depiction of a binary star system. The orbits are shown with dashed lines. One star is revolving circularly close to the center of mass and is shown as a filled circle. The other has a very elliptic orbit further out. It is currently close to its furthest point from the other star. This star is depicted as a pentagram.]

[Caption below the image:]

Space news: astronomers have found the first known system with a main-sequence star orbited by a five-pointed one.

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This is a test. PoolloverNathan^{[stalk the blue seas]} 20:48, 16 March 2021 (UTC)

A foreign student asked me to help fight against his math teacher. That was unusual. He was in that class for just a couple of weeks. The teacher's phone number was sent to me. The student asked me to spam-call the teacher. 172.71.155.55 22:58, 18 September 2023 (UTC)

here i'm just messing around in html, ignore this

^furhhfghure _{guyrburgryhuyvfr} "rvhru"

interesting way of writing quotations xd

hmmm this one of putting "<p>" in a line break will come in handy for when i want it to start at the same place than the first line

Please beware that <p> on mediawiki also disables automatic paragraph breaks, so you need a closing </p> or you'll break automatic paragraph formatting for the rest of the page. Zmatt (talk) 22:06, 31 July 2024 (UTC)

edit: da hek did that "</div>" come from An user who has no account yet (talk) 14:14, 13 October 2023 (UTC)

hi uh its hard to get here. is this a reference to undocumented feature??? hmm... this is interesting.
108.162.241.216 02:05, 23 November 2023 (UTC)

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yum yum ^{[citation needed]}

Hiuiedeixgeyceiyedhcdiedcve {{trout}}

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More testing: hello doesthiswork (yesitdoes) This isn't a good name (talk) 22:44, 28 January 2026 (UTC)

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