Laura Hayes

You can have an eclipsing binary star, so these two star systems, and then a planet orbiting that.

Yes.

Yeah, yeah.

It's super cool.

And, you know, very recently kind of discovered.

So this is what this paper did.

They found 27 new candidate planets that may be orbiting these stars.

And, you know, these binary star systems are, you know, half of the stars that we see are these eclipsing binary stars.

No, yeah, yeah.

That would be really cool.

Yeah, I mean, some of them could have these crazy orbits that we don't necessarily fully know yet, right?

We can't see them.

So we have to try to identify these different kind of methods to seeing them.

But if you think you're kind of all orbiting some center of mass in the middle of those two stars, you can also have planets that are orbiting one star and then the other star is there and all these different orientations.

But again, that makes it really hard to see because we can't just see these exoplanets.

They're so, so faint.

Right.

And so we have to do kind of really smart techniques like this gravitational thing of seeing how this gravitational pull of these planets have an impact on the star.

And then we can look at the stars and see their tiny wobbles in those stars.

And then we can infer, oh, maybe there's planets orbiting.