All of these would extinguish all life in the stars system. In five billion years our sun will swell to a red giant and completely extinguish all life on earth, before exploding into a planetary nebula with a central white dwarf. The more we learn about our sun, and stars in general, the more we can protect ourselves, and perhaps learn to capture more of the suns power. Binary stars can be optical, where the stars are close by chance, and true binaries where the stars rotate around the same center of mass. The orbital period is measured in years.
Spectroscopic binaries are too far away to see the individual stars.
The combined light from the stars is seen as one point source. A spectroscopic binary is followed by the doppler shift of the spectral lines as the star moves in and out from our line of sight. Eclipsing binaries are fascinating to observe because many have highly predictable eclipse events that last a few hours. Taking serial short images, and using differential photometry to obtain magnitude, a brightness VS time light curve can be generated to record the eclipse event. The shape of the light curve is dependent on the relative size of the stars, and the tilt of the star system to our line of sight.