Almost 25,000 light-years away, two dead stars, each more massive than our Sun, but only 20 kilometers in diameter, orbit one another in less than five hours. This unusual pair of extreme objects, ...

Volume rendering of density in a simulation of a binary neutron star merger. New research shows that neutrinos created in the hot interface between the merging stars can be briefly trapped and remain ...

In the early 1960s, Dutch astronomer Adriaan Blaauw observed stars moving at unusually high speeds moving through the Milky ...

"We studied the last several orbits before the merger, when the entwined magnetic fields undergo rapid and dramatic changes, ...

Astronomers have strengthened long-standing predictions that massive runaway stars could have originated in binary pairs, and ...

When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. An illustration of the pulsar system PSR J1023+0038 showing the central pulsar and an accretion ...

Neutron stars—the dense remnants of massive stellar explosions—and their presence in X‐ray binaries serve as natural laboratories for extreme physics. In these systems, matter is transferred from a ...

New research has shed doubt upon the nature of a distant "dead star" that exists in a binary system with an active stellar companion. Scientists behind the research think this stellar corpse is ...

This illustration depicts a binary star system consisting of a dense neutron star and a normal Sun-like star (upper left). Using data from the European Space Agency's Gaia mission, astronomers found ...

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

A huge amount of mysterious dark energy is necessary to explain cosmological phenomena, such as the accelerated expansion of the Universe, with Einstein’s theory. But what if dark energy was just an ...

For many years, binary star research was as neglected as an old Tamagotchi. Not anymore. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. Breaking ...