Science nerds, assemble!
If anyone with a science degree wants to pick this apart for me, please do. It’s the opening pars from a later chapter in The Forever Dead.
I spent hours researching it today, but I’m not a science guy so there may be howlers.
A billion years before self-replicating molecules emerged from the organic soup of Earth’s primordial oceans, two protostars were born within the cradle of a molecular cloud, thousands of light years away. Vast quantities of hydrogen atoms collided under immense pressure, transforming into helium and releasing torrents of energy with each ecstatic embrace. After many millions of years, during which time, some of the emergent organic molecules on faraway Earth had begun to replicate themselves imperfectly, leading to variations in their sequences, the cores of the two impossibly distant protostars ignited with brilliance and fury, flooding the lonesome void around them with fiery trails of light.
The infant stars circled around one another as they slowly moved through the dark matter surrounding the cloud core. Bound by the tentacles of gravity, they drifted away from the center of the nebula which had birthed them, their respective orbits drawing closer and closer together until the twins found themselves in a waltz that would last, effectively, for eternity. Time imposed a clarifying simplicity on their environment, winnowing out the gaseous richness and slowly, impossibly slowly, crafting a binary solar system composed of eleven bodies. The twinned solar masses and their nine planets. On Earth, the process ran in the opposite direction, towards increasing complexity as some organic molecules enclosed themselves within a lipid membrane, capable of maintaining a separate internal environment from their surroundings. This separation allowed for controlled chemical reactions to occur inside the protocells, offering a path to greatly increased diversity.
Even on the time scale of the cosmos, it took an age for those protocells to organise themselves into simple, single-celled organisms lacking a nucleus. And then into even more complicated cells, possessed of a nucleus and other membrane-bound organelles. But this was a critical step. This complexity allowed for more specialized functions and paved the way for multicellular organisms to evolve on the third rock from Sol. From there, everything accelerated, especially once some of the organisms resident on that rock mutated in such a way as to give rise to sentience and intelligence.
It was barely a cosmic moment then before colony ships arrived from far away Sol at one of the many gravitational balance points surrounding the twin stars and began harvesting trillions of gigatonnes of in-system mass to construct a tenth world, a mega-orbital to be known as Cupertino. That structure, a being as sentient as its organic creators, would give its name to the stars.
The Cupertino Binary.
Huh?
Well since you've explicitly invited a thorough nitpicking 😂, I'll have a go - though more along the lines of other stuff you arguably should mention, rather than stuff that is wrong. The pair of protostars you mention is fusing hydrogen to helium. That's the usual thing for stars to do, so all good so far. However, fusing hydrogen isn't all they do. The fact that we live on a chunk of rock is proof of this. As stars get older they start to take on more and more ambitious fusion projects, ie fusing the helium together, and then fusing all the other elements as well. But just to be clear, they are still also fusing hydrogen at this stage. And then when they do the big firework (sorry, just can't get Douglas Adams out of my brain) they scatter all these various elements in all directions. Enough of this scattered matter is hydrogen that a new generation of stars can form. IIRC they think it actually takes several generations of dead stars to get the seriously heavy metals like the ones people hurl at each other on battlefields. Looks like you want to lean on the simplicity metaphor for what these stars are up to, by contrast with the messy organics happening elsewhere, on Earth. Getting into the details of the elemental abundance problem probably detracts from that, so I guess you probably don't really want to go there, so don't mind me if so :).
Are they named after the town in Italy? Or maybe Saint Joseph of Cupertino, the patron saint of students (he kept failing his entrance exams to join the Franciscans) and pilots (he was too simple-minded to know that humans can't levitate, so he did, reportedly). Or even the city in California where commercial real estate is almost impossible to get hold of due to the dominance of one company in particular :).