How Weird Is Our Solar System?
Earth and its Solar System compatriots all have nearly circular orbits, but many exoplanets orbit their stars on wildly eccentric paths. Is our home system strange? Or is our sense of the data skewed?
Earth and its Solar System compatriots all have nearly circular orbits, but many exoplanets orbit their stars on wildly eccentric paths. Is our home system strange? Or is our sense of the data skewed?
Planets orbiting close to type-M dwarf stars are in the habitable zone, but if their orbits are in a 3:2 spin resonance, do their long, strange days and nights have a chance of supporting photosynthetic life?
In today’s paper, the authors study how the periods of two black hole x-ray binaries are changing. They find that the periods are decaying faster than expected based on standard theoretical arguments.
With some assistance from gravity, it is possible with currently-available technologies to bring small asteroids into orbit next to Earth to be studied and mined.
This article considers the fate of planets that orbit stars that will become white dwarfs. Can they survive? Could they be habitable?
A phenomenological series of simulations of dwarf galaxies placed on different orbits around a Milky Way-like galaxy, in order to learn about the properties (and observability) of tidal tails in dwarf galaxies around our Milky Way.