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Jilly_in_VA

(9,971 posts)
Tue Oct 26, 2021, 12:47 PM Oct 2021

Three-Star System has a Secret That Might Violate Physics

Space is full of weird stuff, but more than 1,300 light-years from Earth, there’s a star system called GW Orionis that makes a lot of other bizarre phenomena seem outright dull.

For starters, GW Orionis has three stars rather than the usual one. Two orbit each other, and the third orbits the pair. Already we’re in territory stranger than Star Wars.

And that’s not all. The three stars with their clockwork orbits are surrounded by three rings of dust and gas. Such rings—called “protoplanetary disks,” since they possess the building blocks of larger objects like planets and moons—are common.

What’s uncommon is the orientation of GW Orionis’s disks. They’re misaligned, like a stack of plates with pebbles wedged between them. They are, in astronomical parlance, “torn.”

The disk-tearing is so strange that the only way astronomers who study GW Orionis can make sense of it all is to imagine there’s a giant planet there in the dust and gas, adding its own gravity to the mix.

The problem is, there’s no hard evidence the triple star system is home to any such planet. None. Zero. Zilch

https://www.thedailybeast.com/triple-star-system-gw-orionis-is-either-hiding-a-planet-or-a-physics-breaking-secret?ref=home

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Three-Star System has a Secret That Might Violate Physics (Original Post) Jilly_in_VA Oct 2021 OP
Violations of physics? Headline is clickbait. Tetrachloride Oct 2021 #1

Tetrachloride

(7,844 posts)
1. Violations of physics? Headline is clickbait.
Tue Oct 26, 2021, 12:59 PM
Oct 2021

Even our own solar system has an uncertain explanations of planets.

The headline implies something heretofore unknown to Newton , Einstein or Biden such as wormholes.

Occam’s Razor and such guide us toward more mundane realities when it comes to orbital mechanics.

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