Sirius A and B

[jude_rook]

Finally, a break from the red dwarf stars!  Sirius, or more accurately Sirius A (for this is another binary system), is the brightest star in the night sky.  Unfortunately for us, the reason it’s so bright - aside from the fact that it’s a little under nine light years away - is that it’s a blue-white star of spectral class A, only a lousy few hundred million years old.  Furthermore, its projected lifespan, a billion years or so, won’t give life much time to develop on any terrestroid world it might possess before it turns into a red giant.  And white-dwarf Sirius B comes as close as 8 AU to A, so it would interfere with the formation of any planets in the life zone, which would be centred around 5 AU.  So this system will likely be a lot more interesting to scientists than to would-be colonists.

Still, Sirius has played host to habitable worlds in some of my favourite SF.  I recently mentioned Larry Niven’s Jinx, and in Gordon R. Dickson’s Childe Cycle, it has no fewer than three habitable worlds.  And while it was a piece of cheese in so many ways, I have a certain affection for the original V, where the Visitors came from a planet of Sirius.  I don’t believe we yet know where they come from in the remake.