Speaker Night – Dr. Lea Hirsch

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Speaker: Dr Lea Hirsch, University of Toronto - Mississauga

Here Come the Suns: The statistics and habitability of planets in binary star systems 

 Most planet searches focus on single stars, like the sun. But half of all sun-like stars actually live in binary or multiple stellar systems, whose planet-hosting capability may be quite different. In binary systems, planets can occupy either circum-stellar or circum-binary orbits, but many orbital configurations are thought to be unstable due to the effects of the binary companion. Binaries are also thought to affect the proto-planetary disks of their companions, potentially disrupting their ability to form planets at all.