This image may not be used by or to promote the arms, nuclear power or tobacco industries or any religious organisation, or in any discriminatory way,
This image may not be used by or to promote the arms, nuclear power or tobacco industries or any religious organisation, or in any discriminatory way, or to imply the endorsement by ESO of any product, service or activity Eclipsing binary star systems in the LMC. Optical image of the Large Magellanic Cloud, a neighbouring galaxy to the Milky Way, with the positions of eight faint and rare cool eclipsing binary stars marked with crosses (these objects are too faint to appear directly in this picture). As the two stars of a binary system orbit each other, they pass in front of one another and their combined brightness, seen from a distance, decreases. By studying how the light changes, and other properties of the system, astronomers can measure the distances to eclipsing binaries very accurately. A long series of observations of very rare cool eclipsing binaries has now led to the most accurate determination so far of the distance to the Large Magellanic Cloud, a crucial
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Keywords: -, 8, astronomical, astronomy, astrophysical, astrophysics, binaries, binary, cloud, cool, distance, distances, eclipse, eclipsing, faint, galaxy, image, large, lmc, magellanic, marked, orbit, orbiting, orbits, planetary, position, positions, rare, science, space, star, stars, system, systems, telescope, universe
