'Bullet time' in the Orion Nebula

News Update item on Gemini telescope's image in Astronomy Now magazine, page 11, May 2007 issue.

Wimpy Stars Barely Hanging On

Space.com - Apr 17, 2007
A newly spotted pair of tiny stars that holds the record for the longest-distance celestial embrace is bound by only a thread of gravity and might one day break up...

Celestial embrace is hanging by a thread

MSNBC - Apr. 17, 2007
A newly spotted pair of tiny stars that holds the record for the longest-distance celestial embrace is bound by only a thread of gravity and might one day break up...

Celestial odd couple discovered

Astronomy.com (Astronomy magazine) - Apr. 11, 2007
Astronomers are puzzled by the "Hang-loose Binary" — a pair of low-mass stars with an extreme orbital separation...

Featherweight Celestial Pair Has Uncertain Future Together

SpaceRef - Apr. 11, 2007
Astronomers have serendipitously discovered a record-breaking pair of low-mass stars with an extreme orbital separation. The petite objects, each of which has a mass less than 100 times that of Jupiter, are separated by more than 5,000 times the distance between the Sun and Earth ­ a value that breaks the previous record by a factor of three and leaves the duration of their future together uncertain...

Featherweight Celestial Pair Has Uncertain Future Together

Space Daily - Apr. 11, 2007
... The celestial duo is tethered by a weak gravitational link that results in an orbital dance so slow that it takes about 500,000 years to complete a single revolution. Scaled down, this system would be like two baseballs orbiting each other about 300 kilometers (200 miles) apart.

The characterization of the system was made using near- infrared spectroscopic data taken with the Gemini South telescope, in conjunction with earlier discovery and confirmation observations made at the Cerro Tololo Inter- American Observatory 1.5-meter telescope operated by the Small and Moderate Aperture Research Telescope System (SMARTS) and archival data from the 2-Micron All-Sky Survey (2MASS) and the Digital Sky Survey (DSS).