Citizen scientists have successfully located thousands of previously unknown pairs of “eclipsing binary” stars, NASA announced in June.

Even with eclipsing binaries, measuring the properties of stars is no easy task. Stars are deformed as they rotate and pull on each other in a binary system. They interact, they irradiate one another, ...

Binary stars orbit around each other, and in eclipsing binary stars, one passes in front of the other, relative to the telescope lens. Merikanto/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA Think of a playground ...

Summary A series of very detailed images of a binary system of two young stars have been combined into a movie. In merely 3 days, the stars swing around each other. As seen from the earth, they pas… ...

This reduction means we can obtain fundamental properties – stellar masses, radii, temperatures and luminosities – for every eclipsing binary star ever observed within a month or two.