stellar flyby tagged posts

Exiled Planet Linked to Stellar Flyby 3 million years ago


Researchers explored a material that has an internal structure, shown in 3D in left panel, that consists of triangles and hexagons arranged in a pattern similar to that of a Japanese kagome basket.
Credit: Hasan, et. al, Princeton University

Two binary star systems narrowly missed one another, but left behind a smoking gun. Paul Kalas of UC Berkeley was puzzled by the tilted but stable orbit of a planet around a binary star – an orbit like that of our solar system’s proposed Planet Nine. He calculated backwards in time to see if any of the 461 nearby stars ever came close enough to perturb the system. One star fit the bill. The stellar flyby 2-3 million years ago likely stabilized the planet’s orbit, keeping it from flying away.

Some of the peculiar aspects of our solar system – an env...

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