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Binary Star

|< < Prev #3203 (February 4, 2026)

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

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Explanation

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 co-orbiting with a main sequence star. Here, however, the comic depicts a system consisting of a real celestial object (just such a main sequence star), and a star which is instead a stylised five-pointed shape in which stars are often drawn, called a pentagram.

Pointed stars do not actually exist as astronomical bodies, as the spikes would quickly collapse under the effects of gravity. 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, and not something far weirder.

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) 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) centered on opposite sides of the shared focal point of their barycenter, with all four of the ellipses' foci collinear. Their locations along those paths should be directly in (anti-)phase, and collinear with the barycenter. That this isn't true implies that there's at least one other massive object, which isn't shown, in the system. 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. That the five-pointed star has much less mass makes sense, since it appears to consist only of five intersecting linear structures, with large empty spaces in between.

Transcript

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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Discussion

Maybe it's more of statistics than exhibitions. --While False (speak|museum) 21:17, 3 October 2022 (UTC)

pixels-assembly-3.png

how is it 0 bytes?? i see that it is shown as 0 bytes on the wiki, but the file itself, when downloaded is 5kb! how???108.162.221.209 16:41, 4 October 2022 (UTC)Bumpf

If the question is how it can be written like that here, the answer is that I used the numbers of the wiki. —While False (speak|museum) 19:18, 4 October 2022 (UTC)

Sorry, should have made it more clear. Do you know why it is shown as 0 bytes on the file page? 172.70.134.103 12:37, 7 October 2022 (UTC)Bumpf

There's always the possibility that this is actually the Null image under the .png file format. Every other .png is defined by the delta required to display the desired graphic when starting from the baseline of this 'ur'-image, but if you ever wanted to display that graphic the undocumented format specifications allow you to omit all unnecessary bytes (including the magic header bytes) and it will happily produce its hardcoded "it's a PNG!" preprocessing template, which happens to be this image. Obviously, the PNG spec (and, ultimately, the original ancestor of the detailed source code tree for every subsequent implementation) was written before Randall ever got anywhere near to drawing this image so the chances are slim that he just happened to luck upon the exact image that happens to have a 100% compression rate because it just happened to consist of something Randall wanted to draw, and in the manner of Randall's artistry. But it's a non-zero likelihood that an arbitrary artist might draw exactly the same image as a purely arbitrary "index null" page's collection of pixels and so... This might not be the Best Of All Worlds, but there has to be some highly fortunate occurance to balance out all the unfortunate ones, statistically, and this is ours!

(Or maybe there's a minor bug/data-error in the way the wiki database serves the front-end webserver, but I can't ask you to believe something as trivially random as that!)) 172.70.90.245 15:03, 7 October 2022 (UTC)
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