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Photo: PA
Astronomers have discovered an unusual star system which looks like a game of snooker.Experts from Warwick and Sheffield Universities were part of an international consortium who played a key role in discovering the ''snooker-like'' star system.
They looked at a binary star system called NN Serpentis which is 1,670 light years away from Earth. NN Serpentis is actually a binary star system consisting of two stars, a red dwarf and a white dwarf, which orbit each other in an incredibly close, tight orbit.
Earth sits in the same plane as this binary star system, so astronomers can see the larger red dwarf eclipse the white dwarf every three hours and seven minutes.
Astronomers were able to use these incredibly frequent eclipses to spot a pattern of small but significant irregularities in the orbit of stars and were able to help demonstrate that that pattern must be due to the presence and gravitational influence of two massive gas giant planets.
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