Boomerang, Slingshot, or Torque-Dependent? How to Classify Your Favorite Ring-Satellite System
When moons and rings orbit together, the results can be crazy. This paper proposes three regimes to more easily understand these complex interactions.
Clearing Up Stellar Streams with Gaia
What will new data from Gaia reveal about the formation and evolution of stellar streams in the Milky Way?
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?
How Green Can a Planet in a Resonant Orbit Be?
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?
Orbital Decay of X-ray Binaries
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.
How to Drag an Asteroid to Earth
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.