Astronomers have long faced a strange contradiction: most stars are born in pairs, and ...

One such mystery, described in a recent paper in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, concerns circumbinary exoplanets—or ...

Learn why only 14 out of over 6,000 exoplanets orbit two stars, and how Einstein’s general theory of relativity may be to blame.

Astronomers have found thousands of exoplanets around single stars, but few around binary stars—even though both types of ...

Why is it so rare to find exoplanets orbiting two stars, also called circumbinary planets (CBPs)? This is what a recent study published in The Astrophysica | Space ...

Luke found life on Tatooine to be boring, but he should be glad, because as we have seen, binary stars have the potential to play all kinds of havoc on their orbiting circumbinary planets. When you ...

A team of astronomers observed a confused exoplanet orbiting its two parent stars in a highly unusual way. As New Scientist reports, the planet, which was first discovered in 2004, is located in a ...

In 2019, LIGO and Virgo recorded something truly bizarre – a gravitational wave event less than a tenth of a second in duration. Compared to the drawn-out chirps of black hole binaries on decaying ...

Apples-to-apples comparisons in the distant universe are hard to come by. Whether the subject is dwarf galaxies, supermassive black holes, or “hot Jupiters,” astronomers can spend months or years ...

Berkeley — A bound pair of icy comets similar to the dirty snowballs circling outside the orbit of Neptune has been found lurking in the shadow of Jupiter. Astronomers at the University of California, ...

In theory, it could happen – one of the very first solutions to the three-body problem was this scenario. But it is very unlikely to be stable over time. You need the stars to have near equal mass and ...