Back in early 2023 I got an odd email. Well, it would’ve been odd for normal people, I guess, but not too far off the mean for me.

It was a request for an interview by someone who wants to know what the dangers would be for vampires to travel to Mars.

I mean, duh. I can’t resist a prompt like that! Turns out the email was from George O'Connor, who is putting out a comic series called, “Vampires on Mars”. Seems about right. Anyway, he wanted to inject a little actual science into it, so we talked about the pitfalls of space travel, and setting up shop on Mars. It was fun.

The comic sounds like it’ll be pretty fun, too. He’s been working on it for a while, and now he’s got a Kickstarter set up to fund it! If this sounds like something you’d like to see in the real world, then go drop a little filthy lucre there.

To give you an idea of what we’re dealing with here, he sent me this illustration that’ll accompany the interview in the book done by his artist, Fernando Pinto, and obviously I love it to death. So to speak.

I can’t wait to see how this turns out! But that’ll only happen if he gets funded, so toss him some coin, please.

Binary stars are surprisingly common in the Universe—about a third of all stars are in systems with two stars orbiting each other.

But that’s on average. If you start delineating stars by mass, the numbers change; high-mass stars (much more massive than the Sun) are far more likely to be in binaries, while low-mass stars are less likely. That’s always made some sense to me; if a local clump of gas in a nebula has enough material to make a massive star, it likely has enough to make several stars, and they can wind up forming closer together. A sparser clump might have trouble making even one low-mass star, so making a second one nearby is even harder.

Does this trend continue to even lower masses? And if so, what might affect it?

Brown dwarfs are objects that have less mass than stars, but more than planets. They don’t have enough pressure in their cores to sustain nuclear fusion (the hallmark of a true star), so it’s thought once they form they slowly cool over billions of years. 

We know that young brown dwarfs do seem to form in binary systems, though not as much as in true stars. An interesting question then is, do older brown dwarfs follow the same trend? Could there be some other effect besides mass that affects binarity?

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