Astro Blog

By Jenna Ahart , Science.  Excerpt: Like the fictional planet Tatooine in  Star Wars , some exoplanets ...orbit binary pairs of stars, which cast their worlds in double sunrises and sunsets as they themselves orbit each other. Now, researchers report today in  Science Advances  that they have found  an especially unusual example of such a planet : one that orbits over and under the poles of two failed stars that loom in its skies. ...only 16 exoplanets had ever been confirmed to orbit around a binary pair—and all of those planets orbit within the plane of the stars’ orbits around each other, not over the poles. ...this peculiar planet, known rather prosaically as 2M1510 (AB) b, ...orbits... brown dwarfs, failed stars that aren’t massive enough to spark on. ...In binary systems like this one, the elliptical orbit of each object in the binary will gradually shift its orientation over time, like the axis of a spinning top tracing out a circle as the top wobble...

By Daniel Clery , Science.  Excerpt: Astronomers studying the murky center of our Milky Way Galaxy have discovered something they never expected:  a pair of young stars orbiting each other near the supermassive black hole that is our Galaxy’s dark heart . The observation—reported today in Nature Communications—comes as a surprise because astrophysicists had thought the black hole’s intense gravity would either rip the stars in such a pair apart or squash them together. But the new object, dubbed D9, shows that such a “binary” can survive, at least briefly, near the black hole, and it could help explain other mysterious objects in the vicinity. ...For many years, two teams, in California and Germany, monitored the  closest of those stars . About 20 years ago, both proved the star’s eccentric, high-speed orbit could only arise if it was circling a compact object with extreme mass—a black hole. For that work, the teams’ leaders, Reinhard Genzel of the Max Planck Institu...