An exo-Neptune beat the odds and kept its atmosphere phys.org - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from phys.org Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
After the successful impact of NASA’s DART mission on the Dimorphos asteroid, scientists have encountered a series of unexpected outcomes, the latest being the unanticipated lengthening of the asteroid’s orbital period around its larger partner, Didymos.
Unlike the lonely sun, about half the stars in our Milky Way galaxy are in a long-term committed relationship with another star, orbiting each another in a celestial marriage called a binary system. Researchers this week described one of these marriages gone wrong - a twosome that borders on the extreme, with the pair whirling around each other every 51 minutes in the fastest such orbital period known for a rare class of binary stars. The system belongs to a class of binary stars known as "cataclysmic variables" in which a star similar to our sun orbits close to what is called a white dwarf, basically a hot and compact core of a burned-out star.