Chlorophyliac humans, binary stars and boiling oceans

[gestaltist]

If you don't mind being a little hand-wavy, I think you could get away with giving the two suns a few degrees of separation; they're still going to be close, but they could at least be visible as separate sun disks.

Re:optics, I admit that I'm less secure in the optics department than in the astrophysics department. You could start on the Wikipedia page which includes some formulae for calculating size in arcminutes.

I have already calculated the angular diameters for the Suns and the Moons some time ago. It is about 1632.82" = 27.2' = 0.85 of the Sun’s size as seen from Earth. Which I why I thought I was safe in my assumption that they would be seen as separate entities. (The actual angular diameters are between 26’09“ and 29’8“).

As you have forced me to read up on optics now (you bad person! ) I found some interesting facts.

http://www.physicsclassroom.com/class/l ... terference According to this, the two Suns might appear as three or more objects due to light interference patterns. These might in fact merge into one oblong shape, I think. The thing with this experiment is, this only works for coherent monochromatic light. Which the Suns wouldn’t probably be...

And then: Eureka! I have found this article that shows how to calculate whether or not two light sources will appear as separate: https://www.e-education.psu.edu/astro80 ... l3_p8.html

The article says the distance between the objects has to be at least 1 arcminute. So let’s see.

The distance between the stars is 0.125 AU. The distance to the planet is 1.155 AU. So when the line between the stars is perpendicular to the planet, their visible distance will be 6.17 degrees or 370.6 arcminutes if I am doing the math right. This is calculating from their centers, of course, and given their angular diameters, the distance between their edges will be 370.6 - 27.2 = 343.4 arcminutes. So they will easily be seen as separate objects in the sky.

Where it gets interesting is calculating the distance at various points in the cycle to see when they will start appearing as one object.

Ok, back to doing some complicating maths.

EDIT: I have done the math, and it seems that the Suns will visibly touch each other for only 12 hours and 24 minutes every week. So the eclipse of one sun by the other will actually be an observable event every week that will start in the morning and end in the evening.

Thanks for making me do all these tedious calculations. I have a much better understanding of my world now.

[Zaarin]

If you don't mind being a little hand-wavy, I think you could get away with giving the two suns a few degrees of separation; they're still going to be close, but they could at least be visible as separate sun disks.

Re:optics, I admit that I'm less secure in the optics department than in the astrophysics department. You could start on the Wikipedia page which includes some formulae for calculating size in arcminutes.

I have already calculated the angular diameters for the Suns and the Moons some time ago. It is about 1632.82" = 27.2' = 0.85 of the Sun’s size as seen from Earth. Which I why I thought I was safe in my assumption that they would be seen as separate entities. (The actual angular diameters are between 26’09“ and 29’8“).

As you have forced me to read up on optics now (you bad person! ) I found some interesting facts.

http://www.physicsclassroom.com/class/l ... terference According to this, the two Suns might appear as three or more objects due to light interference patterns. These might in fact merge into one oblong shape, I think. The thing with this experiment is, this only works for coherent monochromatic light. Which the Suns wouldn’t probably be...

And then: Eureka! I have found this article that shows how to calculate whether or not two light sources will appear as separate: https://www.e-education.psu.edu/astro80 ... l3_p8.html

The article says the distance between the objects has to be at least 1 arcminute. So let’s see.

The distance between the stars is 0.125 AU. The distance to the planet is 1.155 AU. So when the line between the stars is perpendicular to the planet, their visible distance will be 6.17 degrees or 370.6 arcminutes if I am doing the math right. This is calculating from their centers, of course, and given their angular diameters, the distance between their edges will be 370.6 - 27.2 = 343.4 arcminutes. So they will easily be seen as separate objects in the sky.

Where it gets interesting is calculating the distance at various points in the cycle to see when they will start appearing as one object.

Ok, back to doing some complicating maths.

EDIT: I have done the math, and it seems that the Suns will visibly touch each other for only 12 hours and 24 minutes every week. So the eclipse of one sun by the other will actually be an observable event every week that will start in the morning and end in the evening.

Thanks for making me do all these tedious calculations. I have a much better understanding of my world now.

And thank you for doing them because I learned something about optics as well.