Our sun is a loner. It lacks a stellar companion hurtling through interstellar space with it. But we’ve known for a long time that that’s actually relatively rare—most stars have at least one gravitationally bound partner. Understanding how exactly those stars are related to each other is critical for observational campaigns—especially for those of exoplanets. So a new paper posted to the arXiv preprint server from researchers at the University of Madrid that categorizes almost every star within 10 light years into companion categories is a welcome addition to the literature on the subject, and could be used to inform the next round of planet-habitable planet-hunting satellites.

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