TREK/ASTRONOMY: Multi-Stellar Systems (SPOILERS)

[dewline]

Back to tonight's episode of Picard for a moment. Possible spoilers of an astronomical nature here...

Okay. Nu Scorpii gets cited in the dialogue of "Broken Pieces" as an  example of a septuple-star system. As of two months ago - if I go by  Wikipedia and there isn't anything in the GAIA data releases published  so far to invalidate that - there's only one other like it that we can  see from here: AR Cassiopeiae. No known system has a higher star-count  than that. Again, so far as we know. Interstellar dust extinction  effects *could* be hiding such from our lines of sight.

Seems to be a lot of extra nebulae scattered across the Trek version of the Orion Arm  established in previous Trek series, and a few extra black holes, so  maybe that covers the Aia system...?.

Comments

[mtbc]

Goodness, I'd not had any idea there were as many stars as that in some systems, I'd thought even trinary rather special.

[dewline]

I'm not sure of the exact statistics of the known systems in the real Milky Way right now, and we're probably going to be ignorant of them for decades yet, even with the help of astronomy and astrometry missions like GAIA, CHEOPS, TESS, etc..

But there is this: the more stars there are in a given system, the fewer known examples seem to exist to be found.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_system