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.
Since gravitational waves were first detected in 2015, instruments including LIGO, Virgo and KAGRA have picked up a steady stream of signals from colliding black holes, building a catalog that now numbers in the hundreds. ...
There's a bit of a historical mystery surrounding the star Theta Eridani. Ptolemy in the second century A.D. and al-Sufi in A.D. 964 both recorded Theta Eridani as one of the 13 brightest stars in the sky. Hipparchus may ...
Astronomy
Jul 10, 2026
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When massive stars die, they unleash some of the most powerful explosions in the universe. Yet not all supernovae are created equal. Some continue to shine brightly for months or even years as their expanding debris crashes ...
Astronomy
Jul 6, 2026
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Using the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA), astronomers have discovered a new millisecond pulsar as part of the ongoing Southern-sky MWA Rapid Two-metre (SMART) survey. The discovery is reported in a research paper published ...
If, in space, no one can hear you scream, it seems that you can actually hear the sound of a crash when two black holes collide. Using the loudest gravitational wave ever heard, two Australian scientists and colleagues have ...
Astronomy
Jun 24, 2026
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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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