10/13/2026
The next meeting of the Chicago Astronomical Society (CAS) will be on Saturday, October 17, 2026 at the Cernan Earth and Space Center.
Please note the schedule for the evening so you won’t be late for pizza!
5:00 PM – Astro-talk over pizza and soft drinks. (Donations are welcome to offset the cost of food and beverage.)
6:00 PM -- The meeting and lecture will begin.
7:30 PM -- After the meeting if weather permits, we will have telescopes set up to view the Moon, and Saturn.
Can a Planet Handle Two Suns?
The sci-fi writers got there first — Luke Skywalker came from Tatoonine, a planet shined on by a pair of stars. Scientists caught up this last decade, with the discovery of over a dozen planets orbiting the common stellar configuration called binary stars. Such circumbinary planets are now being discovered by a suite of methods: crossing in front of their stars, wiggling their stars back and forth relative to our telescopes, and even changing the orbit the stars make around each other. I will tour these results and describe the prospect of future observations. Meanwhile, theoretical progress shows us how these new systems stress-test our concepts of planet formation and evolution, which can impact our origin story, even here in the solo-star Solar System.
Speaker: Daniel Fabrycky is a Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Chicago, which he joined in 2012 after postdoctoral positions at UC Santa Cruz and Harvard. He obtained his BS in Physics at Caltech and his PhD in Astrophysical Sciences at Princeton. Before all that, he grew up in sweet home Chicago, graduating from Prospect High School and South Middle School in the Northwest Suburbs. His scientific highlights concern extrasolar planets (aka exoplanets, those that orbit stars other than the Sun): developing an origin story for close-in hot-Jupiters involving external binary-star perturbations, contributing theoretical insight to the discoveries of thousands of planets with NASA’s Kepler mission, and describing the dynamical architectures of exoplanetary systems to learn about their formation and early evolution.
