Recent Comments

    stellar flybys tagged posts

    Exiled Planet Linked to Stellar Flyby 3 million years ago

    March 3, 2019, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    The HD 106906 binary star hosts a mysterious, asymmetric disk of cometary dust and a giant exoplanet HD 106906 b that is located very far from both the binary and the disk. Close flybys by other stars could have gravitationally perturbed the planet and researchers discovered that the two bright stars to the upper right passed near HD 106906 roughly 3 Myr years ago.
    Credit: Paul Kalas, UC Berkeley

    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...

    Read More