Binary stars as a research area encompass the observational, theoretical, and computational study of gravitationally bound stellar pairs, focusing on their formation, orbital dynamics, mass transfer, and evolutionary pathways. This field investigates how binarity affects stellar structure, nucleosynthesis, angular momentum evolution, and endpoints such as white dwarf, neutron star, or black hole binaries. It also includes characterization of spectroscopic, eclipsing, and astrometric binaries, derivation of fundamental stellar parameters from orbital solutions, and modeling of interaction phenomena such as accretion, common-envelope evolution, and mergers, which are crucial for understanding supernova progenitors, gravitational-wave sources, and the statistical properties of stellar populations.
When stars like our sun age, they puff up into red giants. Their bubbling outer mass gradually escapes into space, and their remaining cores contract into white dwarfs. Since most stars end their lives this way, the universe ...
Astronomy
Jun 15, 2026
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The aftermath of a supernova, a stellar explosion, is usually a slowly fading cloud of hot gas. So when astronomers pointed NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory at the nearby galaxy Messier 83 (M83), they did not expect to find ...
Astronomy
Jun 15, 2026
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A pair of stars spiraling around each other. That's the origin of a new source of repeating radio bursts we've detected, called ASKAP J1745.
Astronomy
Jun 7, 2026
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New simulations show that interactions with a magnetic field can work to decrease the distance between still forming binary protostars. These results can help explain the characteristics of the binary star systems observed ...
Astronomy
Jun 5, 2026
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An international team led by astronomers at the University of Sydney has uncovered the clearest evidence yet for the origin of an unusual class of cosmic signals. In doing so, they have identified a rare stellar system that ...
Astronomy
Jun 1, 2026
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Our sun is a loner. It lacks a stellar companion hurtling through interstellar space with it. But we've known for a long time that that's actually relatively rare—most stars have at least one gravitationally bound partner. ...
Planetary Sciences
May 27, 2026
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Using NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), astronomers have discovered a triply-eclipsing star system. The newfound system, designated TIC 295741342, consists of two sun-like stars in an eclipsing binary and ...
A team of U.S. astronomers has observed a binary pair of white dwarfs where one star is actively devouring material from the other. Led by Emma Chickles at MIT, the researchers revealed one of the clearest views yet of how ...
Using the MeerKAT radio telescope, an international team of astronomers has discovered 15 new millisecond pulsars in 47 Tucanae—one of the closest and best studied globular clusters. The finding is reported in the latest ...
There's so little we know about circumbinary planets—planets that orbit two stars instead of one—that they can feel like the stuff of fantasy. And for good reason: to date, we've only confirmed the existence of 18 circumbinary ...
Astronomy
May 11, 2026
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