binary star
nounDefinition of binary star
: a system of two stars that revolve around each other under their mutual gravitation
Examples of binary star in a Sentence
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Imagine American politics as a system of binary stars, one Republican-conservative, the other Democratic-progressive. — Lance Morrow, WSJ, "Save America From Aunt Sally," 3 Jan. 2019 Alternately, a nearby binary star could have caused the orbit early in the system's migration before establishing its current orbital perch. — John Wenz, Popular Mechanics, "This Planet Has One of the Weirdest Orbits We've Ever Seen," 21 Mar. 2016 To be specific, protoplanetary disks typically form planets eventually, which means there’s a good chance there are planets out there orbiting binary star systems at all kinds of weird angles. — Avery Thompson, Popular Mechanics, "Astronomers Discover Bizarre Quadruple Star System," 15 Jan. 2019 The plates are in surprisingly good condition and include early photographs of eclipses, Jupiter, binary stars, the Orion Nebula, the star Deneb, and many other celestial objects. — Jay Bennett, Popular Mechanics, "Space Pictures From 1895 Found in a Basement," 29 Dec. 2015 The planets that researchers have turned up range from big and weird — like a Jupiter-sized planet orbiting a binary star system — to ones that are closer in size and orbit to Earth. — Sean O'kane, The Verge, "NASA put its famous planet-hunting telescope to sleep because it’s almost out of fuel," 6 July 2018 In 1974, scientists found that a certain binary star system had to be producing gravitational waves—but only because the orbit of these stars decayed at the precise rate that energy had to be exiting in the form of gravitational waves. — William Herkewitz, Popular Mechanics, "At Long Last, Scientists Say They Have Confirmed Gravitational Waves," 11 Feb. 2016 In theory, the powerful gravity of this black hole can disrupt binary star systems that stray too close, sending one star rocketing away at about 1000 kilometers per second, fast enough to escape the galaxy’s own gravitational pull. — Joshua Sokol, Science | AAAS, "One of the Milky Way’s fastest stars is an invader from another galaxy," 8 May 2018 For the study, published March 19 in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Jackson and his collaborators performed 2,000 computer simulations of binary star systems with a small third body representing an object like Oumuamua. — David Freeman /, NBC News, "'Oumuamua' object likely came from a solar system very different from ours," 20 Mar. 2018These example sentences are selected automatically from various online news sources to reflect current usage of the word 'binary star.' Views expressed in the examples do not represent the opinion of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback.
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