{"id":233067,"date":"2026-03-11T10:19:48","date_gmt":"2026-03-11T15:19:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/03\/oval-orbit-casts-new-light-on-black-hole-neutron-star-mergers"},"modified":"2026-03-11T10:19:48","modified_gmt":"2026-03-11T15:19:48","slug":"oval-orbit-casts-new-light-on-black-hole-neutron-star-mergers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/03\/oval-orbit-casts-new-light-on-black-hole-neutron-star-mergers","title":{"rendered":"Oval orbit casts new light on black hole\u2013neutron star mergers"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/oval-orbit-casts-new-light-on-black-hole-neutron-star-mergers.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Scientists have uncovered the first robust evidence of a black hole and neutron star crashing together but orbiting in an oval path rather than a perfect circle just before they merged. This discovery challenges long-standing assumptions about how these cosmic pairs form and evolve.<\/p>\n<p>Researchers from the University of Birmingham, Universidad Aut\u00f3noma de Madrid, and Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics published their findings today (11 Mar) in <i>The Astrophysical Journal Letters.<\/i><\/p>\n<p>Most neutron star-black hole pairs are expected to adopt circular orbits long before merging. But the analysis of the gravitational-wave event <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/news\/2024-04-enable-remarkable-gravitational.html?utm_source=embeddings&utm_medium=related&utm_campaign=internal\" rel=\"related\">GW200105<\/a> shows that this system traveled on an oval orbit long before merging to form a black hole 13 times more massive than the sun. An oval orbit is something never seen before in this kind of collision.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Scientists have uncovered the first robust evidence of a black hole and neutron star crashing together but orbiting in an oval path rather than a perfect circle just before they merged. This discovery challenges long-standing assumptions about how these cosmic pairs form and evolve. Researchers from the University of Birmingham, Universidad Aut\u00f3noma de Madrid, and [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":662,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33,219],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-233067","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cosmology","category-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/233067","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/662"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=233067"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/233067\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=233067"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=233067"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=233067"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}