How to Use binary star in a Sentence

binary star

noun
  • Luke Skywalker’s dusty home of Tatooine was in such a binary star system.
    New York Times, 28 Sep. 2021
  • The stellar-mass black holes found in some binary star systems are too small to be observed in detail by telescopes anytime soon.
    John Dvorak, Discover Magazine, 26 July 2018
  • The goal was simple: explore how planets form in binary star systems.
    Jennifer Leman, Popular Mechanics, 2 June 2022
  • As roughly half of all stars lie in binary star systems, this means that astronomers could be missing many Earth-sized worlds, NoirLab notes.
    Bruce Dorminey, Forbes, 29 June 2021
  • If the binary stars orbited closely enough, one star's carbon could transfer to the other.
    Sarah Lewin Frasier, Scientific American, 26 Jan. 2016
  • 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, 6 July 2018
  • Again, that shouldn't be surprising, given the statistics of how high the frequency of close-in binary star systems are.
    John Timmer, Ars Technica, 5 Feb. 2020
  • The binary star system is actually visible to us with the naked eye.
    Ashley Strickland, CNN, 8 Dec. 2021
  • While Hubble was unable to see through the expanding cloud of dust and debris, Webb provided the first look at the binary star system that formed the nebula.
    Silas Laycock, The Conversation, 13 July 2022
  • Usually the white dwarf accretes this extra mass from its partner in a binary star system.
    Kiona N. Smith, Forbes, 9 Dec. 2021
  • Chatzopoulos' team has proposed that Betelgeuse was once part of a binary star system.
    Jennifer Leman, Popular Mechanics, 21 July 2020
  • Astronomers have now identified the source of that brief brightening — a binary star system a couple of thousand light-years away.
    Kenneth Chang, New York Times, 30 Aug. 2017
  • And so, the detection techniques that were used to find the very first exoplanets around, sort of sun-like stars, were the same types of detection techniques that have been used to study binary star systems for years.
    Quanta Magazine, 18 May 2022
  • But binary star systems are pretty common, and our nearest neighbor appears to be a three-star system.
    John Timmer, Ars Technica, 4 May 2022
  • However, there is another way to find this binary star system, in the constellation of Virgo, at this time of year.
    Jamie Carter, Forbes, 16 May 2021
  • The outburst came from a strange array of cooler molecules, not the helium and hydrogen spewed by binary stars.
    Matt Hrodey, Discover Magazine, 11 May 2023
  • The alternative is a process similar to that which creates a binary star system.
    John Timmer, Ars Technica, 6 Apr. 2022
  • But prose and poetry, although often portrayed as binary stars exerting equal force, are in fact more like a vast planet and its tiny, clinging moon.
    David Orr, New York Times, 14 Apr. 2020
  • Aldebaran is actually a binary star system comprising an orange giant and a red dwarf star, though the latter is way too faint to see.
    Jamie Carter, Forbes, 16 Mar. 2021
  • The second part of Jim's guiding binary star: He's obsessed with the notion of driving a competition car to the world's most demanding races, competing, then driving the same car home.
    Daniel Pund, Car and Driver, 15 Mar. 2020
  • But four months of observations revealed the star system might not be an ordinary binary star system.
    Jennifer Leman, Popular Mechanics, 7 May 2020
  • At times, neutron stars are born as a pair in binary star systems when one celestial object orbits another.
    Elizabeth Gamillo, Smithsonian Magazine, 2 July 2021
  • De Mink, who models the evolution of black-hole pairs from binary star systems, says that accounting for the interlopers will be challenging.
    Adrian Cho, Science | AAAS, 28 Oct. 2020
  • The team’s computer simulations suggest that up to 36% of binary stars can eject asteroids.
    Sid Perkins, Science | AAAS, 19 Mar. 2018
  • Since the data release, Breivik has been refining synthetic versions of the Gaia data for binary star systems.
    Sasha Warren, Scientific American, 22 June 2022
  • Astronomers detected a non-thermal emission from a classical nova with a dwarf companion and reported no young binary stars near the Milky Way’s central black hole.
    Lawrence Jackson, Harper's Magazine, 10 July 2023
  • But two of the company's luminaries remain gravitationally locked, a binary star system: the S and the E.
    Jonathon Ramsey, Car and Driver, 13 Apr. 2022
  • As Heger’s binary stars orbited their central point of gravity, the spectral features in each star’s atmosphere also shifted in wavelength (the Doppler effect).
    Ryan C. Fortenberry, Scientific American, 1 Feb. 2020
  • About 400 x-ray sources, most of them binary stars, are visible here, primarily located near regions of star formation.
    Belinda J. Wilkes, Scientific American, 26 Nov. 2019
  • There's also a theory concerning the space oddity G2, which scientists believe is likely a pair of binary stars.
    David Grossman, Popular Mechanics, 13 Sep. 2019

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'binary star.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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