This is a wonderful posting BA.

You’re making assumptions about the conditions of the bucket. The BA didn’t say you would be holding the bucket straight out, he didn’t say how full it would be, and he didn’t say how fast you would be spinning. You could be holding the bucket upright, it could be filled all the way to the top, and you could be spinning slowly. Almost certainly, some would spill out. There are also various other combinations that would result in a spill.

Or you could just do what Stark says and add in the dwarf nova effect.

Are there rocks ahead?

It’s hard to do but you can demontrate this for yourself with a rock on a string and that bucket of water on a rope – swing them both at the same time and, if you are exceptionally coordinated, you should be able to drop the rock into the bucket. I said it was hard… but I’ve seen similar done (beer bottle on rope and bucket on a rope – it was drunken geek bet).

On the issue of an “average” binary distance, I don’t think there’s a Gaussian distribution for such things, and therefore no “most likely” distance. Some binaries are very close (I think most recurring nova systems would be this kind) while others are much farther apart than, say, Neptune and the Sun.

This leads to several possible configurations for planets in such systems. If the binary pair is close together, there could be planets orbiting both stars. If they’re far apart, each star could have its own planetary system… and there could still be an even more distant “Oort cloud” orbiting both stars.

In answer to previous posts, cataclysmic variable periods tend to vary between 1 to 2 hours and then are usually greater than 3 hours. The longer the period, the further apart the stars are.

I don’t know off the top of my head the orbital period of RS Oph, but the separation tends to be less than 1 AU for the shorter period cataclysmic variables. I don’t have time to calculate it right now but could probably do it as I did my PhD thesis on cataclysmic variables, though not on RS Oph.

Very cool blog post, Phil. Did you do the modeling yourself?

BTW. If I recall right the red supergiant Betelgeux (Alpha Orionis – the tenth brightest star although sometimes brighter than the ninth as its a slight variable) actually has a star orbiting _INSIDE_ its diffuse outer layers.

I also vaguely recall reading somewhere that Sanduleak (catalogue numbers) the blue supergiant star that went supernova in 1987 actually merged with a close compnanion star during its red supergiant phase, the merger turning it into the blue variant of supergiant inwhich state it finally blew up. Any chance of a merger -&perhaops subsequent supernovae in RS Ophiuchi does anyone know?

Thanks BA -excellent news & very well elucidated! (Explained.)

well, there is (not that I know it). If you have any whole number of values, there’s an average. The question is, I think, other than just cool factor, is there anything that the average would tell us? Being such a professional astronomer that I have to look up how to spell it, my bet is on ‘no’. I’d be more interested in the ends of the curve (and it appears that this pair is pretty close to the short end)

Never get involved in a land war in Asia and never get between the BA and his stars..

wait.. did I get that right?