General Discussions

Ping-Pong Planets Can Bounce From Star to Star in the Verse

POSTED BY: two
UPDATED: Friday, February 10, 2012 13:37
VIEWED: 1524
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TWO

Friday, February 10, 2012 1:37 PM

The 'Verse, with its five stars, might not be stable. Planets might circle one star than circle another.

From National Geographic: “A planet in a two-star system can end up in a gravitational ping-pong match that can last for millenia before the planet gets ejected into interstellar space, a new study suggests.” http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/02/120206-planets-stars-b
ouncing-ping-pong-space-science/

The bouncing-planet study was posted last week on the research website arXiv.org http://arxiv.org/abs/1201.6582v1 and has been accepted for publication in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Animations of some crazy orbits from the research can be viewed at www.ast.cam.ac.uk/~moeckel/bouncingplanets.html

The Joss Whedon script for "Serenity", where Wash lives, is
Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/two